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laurie 😔

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vanity fair said happy halloween have some cannibals

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new fun trend: take this quiz and tell me your score

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there's something incestuous about seasoning tofu with soy sauce

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Shows that take place during a small town's quaint and cutesy Christmas celebration are OUT, shows that take place during a small town's weird feminist performance art festival attended primarily by lesbians are IN

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I got the Top 4.47% on this English Vocabulary test

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sherlock holmes deduces you are trans before you've figured it out yourself and refers to you with those pronouns and then when you look confused is like "ah...had you not arrived at that conclusion yet?" and wafts away in his dressing gown to smoke seventeen pipes, leaving you in a gender crisis

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an Iraqi gamer's beautiful review of Disco Elysium

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another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.

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when the other grads in my residency program & I were deciding how we were gonna make decisions together, and how we would make sure everyone got a voice in every decision that was made, we ran into the obvious problem of, like, not everyone can be present for every conversation. and not everyone wants to be.

we had meetings every other week, which gave us 60 minutes to talk about and settle everything from dishes and cleaning responsibilities in our shared living spaces, to social gatherings and shit, to much more serious matters that came up. There were around 20 of us. We couldn't just kick the can down the road every time someone didn't come to a meeting- and we never had full attendance, even though it was technically "mandatory".

Our solution was to share the meeting agenda ahead of time, so everyone had the chance to decide whether they needed to be there or get someone to advocate for them if they couldn't make it. At the meeting itself, the people there could make decisions and take action. If someone didn't show and didn't make an effort to be a part of the conversation some other way, they forfeited their right to be a part of the conversation; they'd have to bring it up at the next meeting if they wanted to revise anything. In the meantime, that decision would still stand.

Our current government isn't really A Democracy in the sense that it isn't oriented towards justice or the inclusion of all voices, and it's not as fair as the system 20 leftist grad students came up with to resolve cleaning disputes.

But it blows my mind when the same people who think a vote = full responsibility for a particular candidate's actions also insist that abstaining from a vote is somehow abstaining from all responsibility.

You could have been at the meeting, dude. You could have advocated for something even slightly better. It's not your fault what exactly people decided in your absence, but you don't get to act like you didn't have a choice to let them make it.

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CUT MY LEAF INTO PIECES

AND THEN WE DRAG AND SORT

FERMENTATION

AND SEEDING

CAN’T EAT A FUNGUS IF I’M NOT FUNGUS BREEDING

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as a knitter, you start to notice how rare it is for characters in tv shows and movies to knit correctly. from worst to best, it ranges from:

- laughably incorrect, just flinging yarn around

- knitting the most basic scarf incredibly slowly because the actor Learned How To Do It For The Role

- old lady actresses casually knitting an intricate lace pattern while doing a monologue

- gromit from wallace and gromit

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California. Specifically the Bay Area. It is shocking and awful.

$20 to rent a movie online for 48 hours i need yall to get so real right now bc that is insane. “that’s the average cost” which is a problem!! if im paying $20 i better get the film on dvd to have and watch forever