#how many more spelling variations can I think up?

[kosher-martian]

We need more Hanukkah movies/specials. Real ones, not reskinned Hallmark movies. The only ones I can think of are:

A Rugrats Chanukah - a classic for us 90s kids.

Lamb Chop's Special Chanukah- I bet your grandparents had a copy on VHS.

Full Court Miracle - actually a really enjoyable Disney Channel Original Movie and one of two "basketball+ethnic holiday" movies they made, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

Eight Crazy Nights - no further comment

What, we couldn't even get to eight movies? We somehow control the entertainment industry and the best we could do is two specials, a TV movie, and a single theatrical release between 1995 and 2003?

I mean sure this plays nicely into my theory that the 90s were an unparalleled time of normalized (i.e. not gawking) Jewish visibility in US media that we have not seen since... but it doesn't have to be! The era of streaming and nonstop content means there has to be at least one desperate coked-out executive who'll throw money at us just to get content to push for the holidays.

You can have this one for free (just do a special thanks in the credits everyone will skip): Hanukkah, Chanukah, Chanuka! A spelling bee + Hanukkah movie.

[windvexer]

how do you do the typicall coffee spell magic? I see so many variations of like say this, charge like this, bless this, etc that I always find myself not knowing what to say and just stirring and looking hard at the coffee. I know its a basic thing but I get lost

Honestly it's not that basic in the sense that you have to already have like 5 things figured out before you start.

I mean if you just take one version of it and go for it, then you're golden.

But if you start over-thinking it (as you have done it seems) then yes, you have to take a step back, and you will then see that it is not quite basic. Except for the fact that you're not typically using correspondences, it really is an entire spell.

Set intent.

You must know how you set intent. Do you do the "present progressive only positive" method? I.e., I am happy.

If you don't know how to phrase and set intent unto your own satisfaction, then you should start there.

Connect to power.

Most people will be using their personal power for this quick enchantment. Observe, believe, feel, understand, or know that your body is glittering with metaphysical energy, a bit of which can easily be siphoned off into this coffee for a magical purpose.

Through only your willpower, your energy can be imparted through the stirring motion and into your coffee.

Once you've chosen intent, spend a moment contemplating now neat it is that you have power and that it's so easy to use it for little things like this.

Transfer power.

This is best done ritually to contain the boundless worries of us over-thinkers. Try stirring the coffee three times (any direction). Do it like this:

Focus on your phrase of intent. Know that your power will go into the coffee. Stir the coffee once. Think, "by stir of one, the spell is done."

Again, focus on your phrase of intent. Know that your power will go into the coffee. Stir the coffee once. Think, "by stir of two, the spell comes true."

Yes, we do it all again. Focus on your phrase of intent. Know that your power will go into the coffee. Stir the coffee once. Think, "by stir of three, the spell serves me."

Ritually tap the spoon/stirrer on the side of the mug. This is a 'ringing of the bell' (whether or not it makes a ringing sound) to indicate the spell is sealed. If you like, when you tap the mug, think a phrase of sealing, e.g., "as I will it, so will it be."

Practice when you can sit down and have like 10 minutes to do it.

That you can do this spell in 10 seconds in the break room is predicated on the idea that you can already do it, as in you are already proficient in this spell.

If you are putting yourself on the spot with others nearby, with no privacy to think and experiment with things a little, stop doing that.

Practice with any liquid. If you hit a road bump, ask why. Do you not believe you can move energy like that, and the spells seem to not work? So then it's time to take a step back and focus on basic energy work.

The coffee thing is like a cantrip, sure, but if your brain is a seam ripper then unfortunately you're going to have to sew yourself a new one. And that will give you some good experience hammering out patterns in your path, but it can mean you need more time to get up and running, and that's okay.

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

Lol remember the early days when there was an about-even split between people who thought that Gabriel would be Hawkmoth and people who thought Alim Kubdel would be Hawkmoth? Good times, good times. Speaking of Alix’s dad, how would you have had the show pan out with him being Hawkmoth instead?

I wasn't around to see it in real time, but I browse fanfics in rough chronological order starting from the beginning of a fandom, so I'm aware that this theory was a thing because I've read a good portion of the fics that were written pre Origins. (AO3 has a last update filter if you want to pair down your options for a less overwhelming selection or just enjoy fics from before certain plot points came to be.)

While I'm aware of the theory, I'm a little confused as to where it came from. Alim only has two brief appearances in season one. The first is from the start of The Pharaoh. In it, we see Alim telling Jalil that historical artifacts are not meant for testing crackpot theories:

Mr. Kubdel: Jalil, these types of frescoes are almost always the illustration of a legend. They called it a legend for a reason... Jalil: That's what everyone thinks. But I know it's real. I can prove it! Mr. Kubdel: Really? And exactly how are you going to prove it? Jalil: I just need to get my hands on Tutankhamun's scepter and recite the spell! Mr. Kubdel: Are you serious? Don't even think of touching that scepter. I'd lose my job on the spot. It's a priceless historical object! Not a toy! Jalil: Come on, dad! We have to try out the spell! What if Tutankhamun had found out how to bring people back to life? Mr. Kubdel: Listen, Jalil! That's enough! Get your head out of those papyrus scrolls and focus on the real world! This one! (leaves)

And his other appearance is from the start of Timebreaker. In it, Alim gives Alix the watch that is later revealed to be her miraculous:

Alix: They're Marinette's parents. You know, one of the chicks I hang out with? Mr. Kubdel: Yes, I remember. They make the best bread in the whole of Paris. (he notices one of Alix's sneakers) Couldn't you have made more of an effort to dress nicely? Alix: What do you mean? I took off my cap. (points to her cap) Mr. Kubdel: But this is a special day. Alix: Well, it's only a birthday. Mr. Kubdel: No, this is a special birthday (reaches inside his jacket pocket and brings out a watch) This family heirloom was made by one of our ancestors many, many years ago. It's been passed down from one generation to the next, on their 15th birthday. And today, it's your turn to inherit it. Alix: It's pretty sweet, dad. But I've already got a watch, synced up to my smartphone. Mr. Kubdel: But sometimes there's more to things than meets the eye. Let's just say that our ancestor was… (opens the watch) Ahead of his time. (Alix gasps) Of course, I'd understand if you'd rather me buy you a new pair of rollerblades. Alix: No, Dad! I'm stoked to have it. It's awesome, thank you! (her phone rings) Mr. Kubdel: Are your friends waiting? Alix: Yeah, but I don't wanna bail on you. It's cool. Mr. Kubdel: No, no, go ahead. (Alix stands up and grabs her cap) Now, take good care of it.

Based on these two scenes, Alim doesn't read like a villain to me. He reads like some sort of protector. If I had to pick a role for him, it would be the guardian, not the villain. After all, what better way to find missing miraculous than to go into a field that has you informed about all sorts of interesting archaeological discoveries? The fact that he's handing out a miraculous only elevates that potential, especially since Alim was smart enough to give it to the kid who was suited to be a hero while leaving Jali is be his conspiracy-theory-loving self.

Another variation of that is to have him (or Alix's other parent) be the rabbit holder and Alim is passing on the torch to Alix because it's time to start her training. He did say that the watch is handed down through their family and, if there's one miraculous that would need a lot of training, it's the rabbit. Plus a history related field is a perfect fit for a rabbit!

Of course, a villain might also go into a field like curation in order to find miraculous, but I'm really not getting villain vibes here. Part of the reason Gabriel makes such a good villain is that he has a clear, understandable goal: bringing back his wife. Alim has nothing like that, so to make him into a villain, I'd have to come up with a motivation for him and the only thing that I can think of is wanting to bring back his own seemingly missing spouse. That's not a very interesting route, though, since it's just a copy-paste of Gabriel's plot and I'd want Alim to be something unique unless you wanted to swap Adrien and Alix for some reason and just tell the same story with a focus on different characters.

I mean, you could make Alim have a motivation like protecting historical artifacts, but then why would he want the ladybug and the black cat? What wish would he be trying to make? Rewriting history won't protect it! I could maybe see a goal of rewriting history to stop a bunch of atrocities, but any historian would know that undoing a given set of atrocities means massive changes to history and it would likely just lead to different atrocities. You'd have to change how humans work or something equally messed up to make a world without atrocities, which makes it a pretty poor motivation as it would make Alim too cartoonish to really work. He'd feel like such a massive step down from Gabriel's complexity...

All of this is why I don't think that the show should have continued post Gabriel. I just don't see what motivation you can give a villain that isn't either derivative or a cartoonish downgrade. "I want to resurrect my wife" just hits different from "I want to take over the world."

To make Alim a villain in his own right, you'd have to redesign major elements of the show. I think a character with his background would work well as a master thief who collects historical artifacts for his own collection or to sell them so that he can live in luxury, but I can't picture his character sending out akumas to terrorize Paris. Ladybug and Chat Noir would go from action heroes to something more stealthy. Spies who are trying to track down Alim and stop his network, returning artifacts to their rightful owners. Not a bad concept for a show, but too different from Miraculous for me to pretend it's a good concept for a series reboot.

[bogkeep]

[now entering: the OPINION ZONE]

the way i feel about Booktok(tm), as a phenomenon, or maybe more as a weird miasma that is seeping through every bookstore i enter, is that we don't see eye to eye. i'm sure it's got a lot more variation and diversity than whatever weird takes bubble up to the surface for my tiktok-less self to stumble upon - mostly i just feel like my motivation for reading books is different than theirs. there is the occasional overlap in the Books I Enjoy / Big On Booktok venn diagram (which makes me feel very weird about those books but that's for me to sort out), but i cannot personally Trust a booktok recommendation, if that makes sense. either way, it's none of my business what other people like to read, and i think me and booktok can peacefully coexist in each our own spheres. (if all of this is completely incomprehensible to you i salute you and envy your peace of mind.)

anyway, a very fascinating discussion that keeps showing up recently is the phenomenon where popular booktok influencers admit to skipping paragraphs that are too long, or only reading the dialogue of a book, or performing shock at a printed book containing Too Many Words Per Page. what fascinates me is not so much that it is happening (though it DOES fascinate me), but how much people reacting to this struggle to explain exactly Why it's so aggravating.

like, i feel like the obvious takeaway is that these people are monetizing their alleged joy of reading, and then... don't? even like to read? that the consumerist aesthetic of Being A Reader is more profitable on a video platform than doing the due diligence of reviewing books properly? that the content machine marches on and if you're too slow you'll fall behind??

INSTEAD the discussion seems to center around the good old "oohh nooo people read BAD BOOKS instead of GOOD BOOKS and IT'S IMPORTANT TO CHALLENGE YOUR BRAINNN or else the MEDIA LITERACY....." and i'm sorry but i think this has been a moral panic for as long as we've had literature. media literacy has never had a golden age that i'm aware of. there's always been trashy romances that authors pump out on the monthly for easy consumption. capitalism is gonna value profit over quality for as long as it's in charge. people who read for fun are gonna read what they're gonna read, and they're gonna read it in the way they enjoy reading. i agree that reading Good Books is deeply fulfilling! but that is my personal and subjective experience that not everyone is going to share.

i think the reason i feel weird about the insistence that you Must, at least occasionally, Challenge Yourself while reading is that... i'm exhausted in my brain. too exhausted to challenge myself for fun. maybe it's a burnout thing. i really really get looking at a paragraph and finding it simply too much to absorb right now. my main method of getting through books these days is in audio format, even if i would personally prefer to read them visually (they'd stick to my brain better, i would see how names are spelled, sudden POV switches between paragraphs would be less confusing). but reading a book in text form is taking me weeks at best - unless it's a special kind of book that i can't help but devour immediately, sleep schedule be damned (which is another toll to pay). some books are just too complex and need too much focus for me to enjoy right now, so i keep having to goldilock my way to what feels Just Right. some books, i'm sure i'll get back to later. some i've made my peace with never picking up despite the fact that they feel Obligatory (my apologies to lord of the rings. i've Tried and i just can't do it). so like i GET IT. sometimes reading is too much.

what i Wish the discussion was more about, was instead finding ways to read that's enjoyable for you. there is literature and screen plays that are Only Dialogue. there's graphic novels. there's audiobooks and e-readers that let you change the font sizes. there's lots and lots and lots of fanfiction that's literally just banter and smut. there's no shame in reading what you enjoy! there's no shame in spending months on the same book! but i suppose it's not as ~Aesthetic~ as purchasing 10 editions of the same book series on amazon dot hell!!!!

[eaglet-if]

Орлёнок Demo Release

Finally, the demo is here! It's not exactly January anymore, but better late than never, right?

You can play it right here!

I also made a post on the CoG forums, if you want to check it out: Link

Features include:

Meeting your family! And getting bullied.

Getting executed!

Rising from the dead!

Celebrating life by slaughtering some rebels!

(Being extremely miserable!)

Feedback:

This is, quite obviously, a work in progress. It is made available so that you, the reader, can give feedback that improves the game.

So, while you can - and should - obviously tell me whatever you want, a specific list of what I need most in terms of feedback can be found here:

Language. English is not my first language (actually, not even my second one), and I mostly read non-fiction academic works when I read in English, so my writing is certainly not at the level it should be. If you have any concrete issues, please tell me, and I'll try to learn how it can be improved.

Spelling. I don't expect much in the way of outright errors, but I do know that I mix up British and American English all the time. The intended style is American English, so please point out spellings that are wrong in that regard.

Inconsistencies. There are a lot of variations between scenes, and I'd like to make the story as immersive as possible; so, if a phrasing, a character's behaviour etc. feel like they don't fit into the choices you previously made, please tell me. In detail, if possible, otherwise I won't be able to amend it.

Sensory descriptions. AuDHD makes my brain process sensations, including visual impressions, very differently, which means I often end up forgetting those exist. Please tell me about scenes that lack description in that regard. (My first grade elementary school report card called my writing 'efficient and devoid of feelings', and I'd very much like to move past that.)

Technical problems. The code should be pretty solid, but with how complicated it is, it'd be weird if there weren't at least some problems. If you find them, please try to include as much detail as possible when telling me about it. (CS Quicktest and Randomtest are not usable due to the complexity of the code, lol.)

You liking the story. I remain thoroughly convinced that I am a worthless person who isn't able to, nor deserves to create anything, and currently my only motivation to continue this project is derived from pure stubbornness. So, if you, for some reason, actually like this demo, please tell me. It won't change my mind about how bad I think it is, but it will force me to continue in order to avoid being even more of a disappointment.

Additions. If I like your idea, I'll probably add it right away; if I'm unsure, I'll do a poll. You can get me to do almost anything if you say you're sad if I don't do it.

Formatting. Although I try to playtest as much as possible, it's not that easy with how many variations there are, and in VS Code it's sometimes hard to see how well or badly readable text passages actually are.

CWs/TWs (v0.0.1):

Graphic violence and gore

Attempted sexual assault (against the player, avoidable, f!MC only; also against an NPC if massacre route is chosen (is dealt with quickly))

Suicide attempt (by the player, avoidable; f!MC only)

Loss of loved ones

Massacre of civilians and/or PoWs (avoidable)

General misery

(please let me know if you think this needs additions)

As of yet unfinished content:

Autistic variations do not exist yet for the latter part of the demo

Only one of three locations for taking a walk available for now

Tooltips are incomplete

Asexual is not available yet, as it requires a lot of additional scene variation text

Special (psychopath) routes are missing from some scenes as they were added late in development

Choices that are locked and marked as (WIP) are unfinished

Interaction routes for Semyon/Selena, Mikhail/Marina and Leon/Leah. They are top priority for the first set of updates

It is recommended that you play this with a stable state of mind. If you choose the suffering paths because it's relatable and/or as a coping strategy, please make sure you have support available and avoid triggering yourself too much.

The whole point of this game (apart from the dress-up part) is that, no matter how bad things get, you shouldn't stop fighting. It's your enemies who deserve destruction, not you.

Please keep in mind that I am both literally insane and pretty reasonable, so: if there is anything you find grossly offensive, don't assume I meant anything bad by it. Just explain to me why you think it shouldn't exist, and if I am convinced, I will amend it.

[sketchehm]

Augh wait, completely non Canon but I just had an idea for like, if the cats were actually kids

_-_-_-_-_-_

'I have an important message for you'

The message is followed by a three minute audio.

Finally, after hours of scrubbing through months and months of massages between Sapnap and his old family, they finally found something about his mission to infiltrate Team Mafia.

(Shadoune swears Sapnap wasn't on his phone this much. How did he find the time to text these two so much? How many times do you need to text someone a reminder to eat in one day??)

The phone is already connected to a speaker so they can all hear everything without having to circle around it, so there's only hesitante stopping them from pressing play.

This is what Sapnap was sent here to do. This spells out exactly the ways he was ordered to betray them.

Shadoune presses play.

"Hi Dad! Hiiiiiiiii" Two children voices come from the speaker, "We miss you lotssss!! I got the tiara you sent me! Me and Patches are matching now, we look like sisters!"

"Of course we do, we are sisters stupid."

Another child's voice sounds out, a little father away and a little deeper

One of the first two kids giggles, and there's a shuffle before the other's voice sounds again

"When are you coming back home? Pops and Papa say we should take down the Christmas decorations, but I like them!! Milo don't steal the phone! I'm asking Dad when he's coming home! Oh yeah... Dad we miss you a lot, will you be done with work soon?"

"You two..."

There's two tiny sad sighs

"We know... Be careful Dad, we love you lots! You need to tell us all the cool work stories when you get home! Yeah, we need like, 5 whole bed time stories when you come back! Love you bye! Byeeeeeeeee-"

The audio ends. There's pure silence in the room, a variation of shell-shocked faces all around. Serpias looks a little teary, and no one is quick enough to grab him before he rushes off, thankfully up to his room instead of to the basement.

"Creo..." Rich starts awkwardly, "Creo que eso es suficiente por hoy."

_-_-_-_-_-_-_

Honestly Serpias would probably run straight to Sapnap, but if anyone ever brought up his kids while he was in the basement he would murder them with his bare hands and I didnt know how to write that right now so... Serpias! To your room!

Serpias beloved 🥺

He just wants the best for Sapnap always and forever....

Serpias after going through every crisis and still not thinking straight, he makes a quick pitstop, shoving something in his pocket before going down to the basement in the dead of night.

Sapnap is actually awake with Dream this time. And when they see Serpias enter... Eyes bloodshot, sniffling, overall looking terrible.....well. Sapnap is beyond worried. He grabs Dream's arms tightly. He doesn't know what Serpias is gonna say.

"Lo siento."

It's quiet. Could barely hear it over his sniffling.

Sapnap thinks they're going to die.

Dream asks what's wrong. Tone dangerously grave.

"You....have children..."

Dream will tense. But Sapnap will be on his feet. Hands already gripping Serpias' shirt collar and slamming him against the door

"What happened with them?"

Serpias has never heard Sapnap so serious, so frightening. It's actually the first time he's heard Sapnap speak on his own without Dream.

Sapnap will scream in Serpias' face asking what happened. Threatening to make his death and everyone else's in this house slow and painful if they laid a finger on them. His eyes are wild. The kind of insane he's only witnessed watching Sapnap in the ring and taking down an opponent.

This is life or death to Sapnap he realizes.

George is waking up from the noise as Sapnap continues to yell and slam his head against the door. What happened. WHAT HAPPENED!

"NADA! SAPNAP HICIMOS NADA!"

Serpias can barely get it out. He feels dizzy. He might be bleeding.

"Then why are you sorry." Sapnap's cold tone hurts Serpias' more than scares him. Never wanting Sapnap to hate him ever. But he knew this would happen. Expected to be more than half dead by this point.

"For taking you away from them....They are alone..."

It's quiet again.

"Why are you saying this?" It's Dream. His tone is cold and calculating, something Serpias is familiar to. Welcomes it even. Something to focus on that isn't Sapnap's hatred.

"Para escaparé." He produces the keys in his pocket. They're for a car.

And Sapnap let's him go. Serpias feels really dizzy without the support now. The headache so overwhelming, he can't help close his eyes. He's out cold before he falls over.

When he wakes up he's in the infirmary with Farfa at the side of his bed. He can feel the headache of a concussion, the back of his head pounding. He notices the bandages wrapped around his head.

"Se fueron."

Serpias jumps at Farfa's voice. But once the words register, despite the incredible pain, he can't help but be relieved.

[ranahan]

i've been pondering how mando'a-as-first-language speakers might tend to parse [θ] and [ð]... we know <x> = <sh> thanks to ryan kaufmann (which i'd say must be canon enough since traviss didn't contradict it) and [f ~ p] and [z ~ s] from Traviss, (and maybe <vh> = [f] at least dialectally a la Vhett -> Fett, but I'd prefer to think that's more a matter of Basic speakers parsing [ɸ] as [f] than [ɸ ~ f] being widespread in mando'a) but I don't think we have any data on how they'd tend to parse [θ] and [ð]. I like the idea of th-fronting where [θ] becomes [ɸ] and [ð] becomes [v ~ ʋ] (Kiwi English is allegedly developing this phenomenon), but since mando'a phonotactics don't seem to allow [ɸ] outside of a syllable-initial position (of course since vhe- words are the only example we have of <vh> the data is a biiit limited, but if we assume it's true) I do wonder how likely mando'ade would be to parse, for example, the [θ] in "cloth" as [ɸ], or if they'd be more likely to parse it as [t] or [s]. Tho I do also like the th-fronting bc I wanna distance <vh> from <f> as much as possible :') Not a cipher! 🗞️

On the other hand I'm a bit charmed by [θ] -> [s] as well, mostly bc I associate it with the Askie pronunciation of ת‎, historically [θ] which has in different regions either remained as such or become [t] (Modern Israeli) or [s] (Askenazi). But then the lack of [z] for [ð] (since [s] and [z] are not readily differentiated among mando'ade) makes it less ideal imo. I mean ofc they could be mismatchy, it's not like [ð] and [θ:] were replaced with other sounds neatly and evenly in Finnish (and there's that variation across dialects, which of course would be a thing among mando'ade as well--) But yeah, [ð] could be, if not [v ~ ʋ], then [d] or even [ɾ] or [l]... for obvious reasons I find the idea of the [ɾ] realisation pretty charming :')

anyway, uh, thoughts?

(yes i am thinking abt this bc loan words mostly)

(also. while generally i prefer [f] -> [p], ~kevhe [or whatever final vowel would be best...] for caf is much nicer than kep, lol...)

I’m afraid your ask is going to be better thought out than my answer!

I did think about the same thing, then thought about the option of ð being loaned as dh in Mando’a, and then got hung up in determining what the heck Mando’a phonology even is, and what do the dh etc. spellings stand for. And then never really got back to loanwords.

But now that I’ve found an answer that satisfies me, I do have a whole bunch of things I’d like to loan to Mando’a actually, because I for one don’t buy that a language of an empire, itself a creole (if you subscribe to that headcanon), does not have many loanwords. You know that joke about English mugging other languages and riffling through their pockets for loose vocabulary? I think it would be more realistic for people to make similar jokes about Mando’a, and how Mandalorians plundered half of the galaxy and half of the dictionaries too. (Yes, this is the hill someone else will die on.)

Anyways, yes I do have thoughts. Sorry this is going to be very long and rambling because these are more of immediate thoughts rather than something I’ve formed a considered opinion on.

Like you, I’ve also noted that vh only occurs in syllable initial position in the Mando’a dictionary. But! There’s a Mandalorian world called Ceravh, which as far as I can tell comes from Traviss. I’d give that even odds of being Mando’a or being (perhaps a Mandalorianised version of) a native name of the colonised world, which could indicate that Mando’a could use syllable-final vh in loanwords at least.

But anyways, another option I have thought about is that a word-final φ could get loaned as v. Even if Mando’a doesn’t allow a syllable final φ, the voiced counterpart v is very common in that position. So e.g. caf > kav. Or heck, how about h? > kah. Idk how sensible h would be, it just popped into my mind as something that could sound similar and is allowed in the coda.

Another option of course is that Mando’a could insert extra vowels into loanwords, like e.g. te reo Māori which basically keeps all of the original sounds and adds vowels until the word conforms to te reo phonotactics. So e.g. caf > kavha or kevhe or whatever the vowels would be. There’s this quote, which has a different context, but be used as a precedent if you wanted? “Pronouncing terminal consonants varies in songs. They often become extra syllables. For examples, tor becomes to-rah and tang becomes tan-gah to maintain rhythm and meter.”

On the other hand, loanwords, especially old ones, could also be subject to Mando’a’s habit of contraction. Which tbh seems as much fanon as canon to me in that canon shows some contraction and elision (especially in compound words), but fanon has observed that pattern and taken it as a licence to go an extra mile. I kind of love that kind of an emergency and it’s what got me interested in Mando’a in the first place. I digress, but I’m trying to say faithfully borrowing every single sound is not necessarily the way I’d go for Mando’a. Maybe borrowing syllables as the closest equivalents would feel better? Idk, maybe I’ll try a couple of different approaches with some test sets of loanwords and see what happens.

I do generally like f > p, but… Idk, the results don’t always compel me? They don’t sound unlike Mando’a, but also not exactly like Mando’a either? I mean kav feels more like Mando’a than kap to me. Same for vhervhek vs perpek (although for obvious reasons, perpek does appeal as a curse). But on the other hand, fan > pan vs van vs vhan? Not much of a difference. And Fi > Pai, Felucia > Pelucya/Pelusha, even Falleen > Palin/Paliin do sound good to me. This is probably because while there are words that end in p (like kotep, taap), they are pretty rare. While words ending in v or beginning with a p are a dime in a dozen.

I agree that Vhett being spelled as Fett is a transliteration from Mando’a to Basic, and not necessarily indicative of how Mando’a L1 speakers would adapt loanwords from Basic to Mando’a.

Re: θ/ð, I’ve previously considered t/dʰ, but I like both s and th-fronting better! Those would be the closest fricatives, wouldn’t they.

Mando’a doesn’t seem to have /z/, which seems to be an allophone of /ts/ rather than /s/, if you go by Traviss’s recordings. Or maybe it’s an allophone of /s/, if you go by some comments. Heck, maybe it depends on the dialect. So perhaps you could go with s/ts, or level them both as s? I guess it would depend on whether z gets loaned as ts or s?

Or go with th-fronting (θ > ɸ, ð > v) in syllable initial positions, and for the coda, either voice the θ > v, or add an extra vowel after it, or allow φ in the coda for loanwords. I think that at least for dialects that realise <v> as [β], th-fronting sounds really close. I like it!

And since some Mando’a dialects seem to have [b ~ v] (or perhaps more likely [v ~ β], or maybe some dialect has /β/ which is heard as /b/ in some others…), after making the rounds in Mando’a dialects, a loan word might even end up with ð > v > b.

Full disclosure, I also like how either would make loanwords a little less immediately recognisable. But on the other hand, loanword phonology is also affected by the speakers’ understanding of the donor language, which might bias e.g. /t/ over /s/. Idk though how much we need to nitpick realism in an artlang though. Enough to ground it, not so much the art goes out.

And then we of course have the loan words Traviss picked from English:

besom /ˈbiː.zəm/ > besom /ˈbɛ.sɔm/

Bergen /ˈbəɹɡn/ > birgaan /bɪɾ.ɡaːn/

TAB /tæb/ > taab /taːb/

hyem /jɛm/> yaim /ʝaɪ̯m/

charva /ˈt͡ʃɑːvə/ > chaav’la /ˈt͡ʃɑːv.la/

chebs /tʃɛbs/ > shebs /ʃɛbs/

scran /skɹan/ > skraan /skɾaːn/

scunner /ˈska.nɐ/ > skanah /ska.nah/

(Geordie) way aye /ˈwaɪ.eɪ/ or (Pompey) weee /wiː/ > wayii /wa.jiː/

dinny /ˈdɪ.nɪ/> dinii /dɪ.niː/

jack /d͡ʒæk/ > jag /d͡ʒaɡ/ ?

(I’m not counting mhi and kando from that linked post, since they—or at least kandosii—are pre-Traviss Mando’a.)

Bit of a guess at the pronunciations because I’m not a Geordie and Traviss doesn’t do IPA, but I’m getting the feeling that the vowel qualities don’t match up that well. I might have loaned Bergen as *bargen or *begen instead. Besom i > ɛ I can excuse as levelling the vowels to the same height, which seems like something Mando’a is prone to. ɛ > aɪ̯ is interesting. But generally, I’m not sure what I’m looking at here? Maybe just artistic licence?

Of course if actual historical loans, we’d have to consider that those words might’ve been loaned from a dialect or at a time when the pronunciation differed from modern/RP pronunciation. Plus I at least like to think that Mando’a itself has many different dialects, so I’d be willing to excuse a degree of artistic licence and inconsistency, especially when it comes to vowels which are more fluid to begin with. Afaik it’s also not weird for natural languages to exhibit even considerable variation in loan word adaptation.

Ch is loaned both as ch and sh. Syllable-final r seems infrequently loaned (birgaan) or not (chaav’la) or loaned as h (skanah)—perhaps this reflects the (non)rhoticity of the dialect from which the loans came from, because Mando’a does have syllable-final r’s. Otherwise the consonants in these words seem unremarkable.

Talking about r though, I think there are some words in Mando’a where n > r in certain environments (or at least that could explain some etymologies). I guess it wouldn’t be too much a stretch to extend that to d and maybe ð. You can hear [kote], [kode] and [koɾe] or the Republic Commando OST. Imo this is simply the effect of singing on pronunciation (I was a trained singer once upon a time, I could go on about this), but Traviss seems to have taken it as t and d being interchangeable, or /kode/ being the archaic pronunciation and /kote/ modern.

Also as an aside, I kinda want to work out the phonetics of Huttese, because clearly Huttese (or trade/pidgin/creole Huttese, whatever they speak as a lingua franca in the Outer Rim) has lots of Basic loanwords, and I think that many Basic loanwords would probably arrive to Mando’a via Huttese rather than directly from Basic.

tldr: You have seem to have thought more about this than me. Do you have more thoughts? I’m not sure how much sense my reply made; it was bit of a brain vomit. I’ll probably go read some things and come back to this later with hopefully more sense, but I wanted to reply now because I’m not sure how busy I’ll be in the near future.

P.s. you wouldn’t happen to remember where you read about <x> = <sh>, [f ~ p] and [s ~ z]? I mean I remember reading some of those same things, but it was at least a year ago and I don’t seem to have saved the source (whoops). I can probably look up the source myself if you remember where it was. Might it have been this forum thread? “So, Xaga might have been "Shaga" (incorporating that "sh" sound the Mando like) and Zuka could've been Suka.”

[chameleonspell]

HTDC commentary - 24: lies

[Looking back at HTDC after nearly ten years: comments on lore, character notes, influences, art, whatever. May contain spoilers for later chapters.]

chapter text: 24: lies

TV Guide-style episode summary: After a spat with Tsiya, Iriel seeks out Sottilde for advice, but her drug dealer recommendation might be more than he seems.

I kind of love writing TV-guide-style chapter summaries. The format is such fun: one sentence long (maybe two if there's a B-character plotline), no spoilers, and as many cliches as you can cram in. If at all possible, end it with: "Hilarity ensues."

“Fool!” Tsiya hissed. “Vorar Helas was Tsiya’s connection! With that one dead, there will be even less sugar coming into Balmora! What was Iriel thinking?”

I hadn't thought of this direct consequence until I got to writing this scene, but it made immediate sense. And we need to inject some real conflict to get Ire out of this stagnant living arrangement.

Tsiya cannot care for all the thousands of slaves in Vvardenfell! Slaves die every day! Tsiya has enough to do caring for Tsiya, and making sure SHE doesn’t die, because nobody else will!” “You’re horrible,” said Iriel. “You’re a horrible person.

Iriel is perfectly familiar with Tsiya's viewpoint, having held variations on it himself. He understands survival. He has no interest in extending sympathy to Tsiya on this point, just as he has no interest in extending sympathy to himself on it. His words may be cruel, but they're technically not hypocritical.

But Iriel is so sure he’s superior to Tsiya, even though he’s the one leeching off her hospitality, wasting her sugar, using up her skooma, telling lies about her to Habasi.”

It comes off as hypocrisy, of course, complete with a sneering veneer of Altmer superiority. Is it Ire's fault, that his culture's reputation precedes him? No, but he's also leaning into it, as a defensive reaction. He's heard that tone, seen that expression. He can imitate it well enough, when he wants to. And it's not entirely a pose - he does think he's superior to Tsiya, or at least... that he ought to be. So it's worse, if he isn't. But we'll pick up on this mental thread, later.

“Lies? I told her the truth!

Given the chapter title is "lies", and accusations are flying, I should mention that nobody has told any actual lies, yet. It might be better if they had, since the truth is so much harsher.

He was too angry to tell how much of his own self-hatred was bleeding into his hatred of Tsiya. His inability to tell the difference only drove him deeper into fury.

Spelling it right out, here. Ire's habit of taking his self-hatred out on other people, looking for valid targets. Notice that he also, even in the heat of the moment, knows he's doing this, thus ensuring an ongoing supply of fuel for the self-hatred engine.

“GET OUT.” Tsiya’s claws twitched convulsively, and there were tears in her eyes. “GET OUT OF TSIYA’S HOUSE. NOW.”

I'm reminded of a passage from much later on:

Iriel sometimes felt the great turning points of his life were less about big decisions, and more about fuck-it moments. Times when his frustration would build to such excruciating levels, that it could only be relieved by acts that forced a change in his situation, even a negative, self-destructive one. Throwing himself off a cliff, because the bottom of the cliff promised to be a different place from the top.

Anyway, this moment comes under this heading: deliberately provoking Tsiya into kicking him out, because anything's better than continuing their rancid little cohabitation.

“There is no more skooma! Irrriel should give Tsiya the skooma he found in Hla Oad!” “What skooma? I didn’t find anything! Your information was as full of shit as you are.” He didn’t turn to meet her eye.

Ah, here are the lies. Iriel certainly did pick up some stray skooma bags during his Bitter Coast meanderings. And as for Tsiya...

Sure enough, three bottles of skooma were hidden inside one of the storage jars at the back, and he hesitated for less than a millisecond before putting all of them into his bag.

...of course she has a back-up stash. As Iriel knows, since it's what he would do. And he knows that, if the situation were reversed, she would steal all HIS skooma, so why (he thinks) shouldn't he take hers? They're exactly as bad as each other, so he can't feel guilty about hurting her - at least, not just yet.

Holding it high out of her reach, he forced his way through the door

Altmeri height privilege at work! Not only are Altmer the tallest race in Morrowind, (as you can see from the ingame character model height multipliers) Khajiiti women are the shortest in pure elevation reached - technically Bosmer men are shorter, and Breton women equally short, but in practice, Khajiit digitigrade leg angles knock a fair bit off the real-money height of female Khajiit. Even with her knife-hands, Tsiya doesn't have a hope.

[Sottilde] looked him up and down. "Shor’s balls! Your shirt looks like something with a whole lotta teeth ate it, an’ threw it back up.”

Tsiya definitely gave it her best shot, though.

I think I stole "Shor's balls" from @sunderlorn, but he thinks he stole it from someone else, too. Whoever created it, thank you. It is the perfect Nordic curse. Tilde didn't say it in my first version of this scene, though, because I hadn't yet realised she ought to talk like my friend [redacted]. Once I fixed that, everything fell into place.

“Ah… yes. That would be Tsiya’s claws, and then before that there was the boat, the silt strider, the blood, the swamp… Mara’s arse, when did I last change clothes?

I think "Mara's arse" is one of mine, though? Anyway, this line is me the author speaking through Iriel, as I realised how many consecutive scenes I had dragged him through with no chance to clean up or get changed.

Sottilde watched, grinning, as he pulled his shirt off and started rummaging through his bag for another. “That’s just rude an’ uncalled for,” she said, “taunting me with that view when you’re off-limits to the ladies.”

She's not fully formed as a character yet, but Sottilde's already making blatantly horny remarks, and generally being adorably dreadful. Which is why Iriel immediately fell in love with her, because what's a best friend, if not someone who cheerfully offers themselves up as a target for all your bitchiest jabs? As we know, Iriel likes having a target, and because Tilde's making herself one on purpose, he doesn't even have to feel guilty about it. Even better, he doesn't have to self-filter, with Tilde (evidenced by the fact he's already out to her), since she's always being filthier and more inappropriate then him.

Sottilde's just so laid back and non-threatening, she can get away with anything. She's so frank and open with her lascivious comments that it converts into a weird sort of innocence - there's no shame to her at all. I assume she opened their acquaintance proper by hitting on Iriel on general principle, but upon realising that was a non-starter, she swiftly and enthusiastically shifted gears into friendship, with zero awkwardness or damage to her ego. Iriel likes that she still makes a point of telling him he's hot, now and again - not because she's creeping on him, but because she thinks her friends ought to know that they're hot. He appreciates the effort, even if her specific tastes mean he's not sure it's a compliment.

“Oh, I like skinny, me. This one time, I saw a picture of a really hot guy on the town news-board, but when I got closer to see if I could get his name, it was a can-you-identify-this-corpse drawing of some poor sap they’d found dead of starvation in a cave-in.”

This is a true story, that I stole from a different friend, and slightly adapted for Tamriel. The original was something like: "I knew I had a thing for skinny men when I saw  a photo of a hot guy in the paper, and he turned out to be a prisoner on hunger strike, taken three days before he died." Which is way funnier, but Tamriel doesn't have photos, and also I didn't want to steal the anecdote too precisely.

Ire almost choked on his wine. “You’re terrible! What kind of Nord are you? Is that why you’re not in Skyrim any more, they threw you out for disrespecting brawn?”

See, he gets to feel all prim and pearl-clutching when he's with Tilde, which is great fun, since other people usually make him feel like the weird, perverted one.

“Yeah, that, and the whole stealing military secrets, traitor to my homeland thing.”

Everyone who meets Tilde gets to listen to this whole silly, self-deprecating bit, where she pretends to claim she's a superspy revolutionary and political dissident, then admits that what actually happened was that she worked as a clerk in an outpost near the Skyrim/Morrowind border, had military secrets flirted out of her by a cute Dunmer agent who got her drunk, and then had to flee the country in a panic when her boss found out.

She smirked. “Who says I wanna sleep? Why’d you think I came here?” She leaned forward, conspiratorially. “Seen any… elves?”

Because sometimes people tell me they read the fic without ever playing Morrowind, I feel I have to explain things like this: Nord NPCs in Morrowind often greet you with: "Seen any elves?" Then they laugh, because it's a Nord dad joke. Because Nords and elves are ancient enemies, and used to hunt and kill each other a lot.

Sottilde, in defiance of her country's usual "sporadically shaved bear" beauty standard, hunts elves for more salacious reasons. Iriel considers this a creepy racial fetish, and he's honestly not wrong. He likes her all the more for it, though, because it gives him free target practice on her.

She paused, tapping her fingernails on the bar. “You really oughtta quit, you know.” A sigh. “I know.” “I don’t wanna lecture you. I know it’s not an easy thing, and it’s gotta be your choice, but…” “I know. Thanks.”

You can immediately see how much better Iriel is, now, at navigating a friendship, and handling the gentle suggestion that he needs to quit drugs. Compare his panicked, defensive reaction, back in Vivec, when Dro'Zaymar tried something similar. Back then, he couldn't comprehend what his life might look like, without his addiction holding it up. He's much closer to being able to do that now, and he can see Tilde's non-judgemental concern for what it is.

But he's still not quite ready to make the break.

She rolled her eyes. “I shouldn’t enable you.” “Would it help if I took my shirt off again?” “Whore.” “Please don’t insult whores by comparing them to me. It’s a skilled profession, and I’m merely an enthusiastic amateur.”

I really don't know how Ire and Tilde became so close so quickly, it just happened. Right from the start, they glommed onto each other, and before I could blink, they were best friends ten bizarrre in-jokes deep, and I couldn't stop writing her into scenes. Obviously, this only continued to escalate. I am not kidding at all when I say that this is the most important and significant relationship, not just of the fic, but perhaps of Ire's entire life. The growth of their love is less messy and dramatic than Ire's romantic entanglements, and it takes up less of the word count as a result, but it's no less deep. That's part of why the ending is the way it is. Blame Tilde, basically.

There’s a friend of Bacola’s who comes in sometimes. I dunno much about him, but he’s a sugartooth. No clue where he gets his supply from, but he never seems to run out. In return for his name and address, though, you gotta tell me more about this Kaye guy.

Much later, Iriel says of Sottilde:

Do you know, she… she was the first person I ever met in my life who thought my gayness was a positive thing about me. Aside from Reu, perhaps, but everything he said had an ulterior motive. Tilde had no reason to pretend, she was open as a summer sky, and she thought it was wonderful. Encouraged me! She could be nosy and overly, um… imaginative, but… she’ll never know what her unconditional acceptance meant to me, at the time.

Iriel views Tilde's borderline-fujoshi streak with bemused toleration, because in his world, it's such a novelty. He tells her off when she goes too far, but on the whole, Iriel likes Sottilde for her faults, not despite them. She makes him feel normal.

Anyway. Ire's off to find the Spymaster.

It's nice when you can set up these little plot dominoes. To push a character towards something that most readers will know is inevitable, but you don't it want to feel inevitable, in a brutal, author-forced way. No weird coincidences, or out-of-character decisions. You want it to seem natural that this would lead to that happening. Iriel needs skooma, and Caius Cosades is well-known as a skooma addict, at the South Wall. Ire would never voluntarily attract Cosades' attention, if he realised who he was, but how likely is it that he recalls a name he was told once, back in Seyda Neen, when he was deep in a dissociative haze?

Let's see how fast he remembers.

Art pick: Iriel by @bigger-rat. Beautiful lighting. Immaculate resting-bitch-face. Absolutely perfect nose, in particular - the slight upturn and irregularity in the bridge that, if you're Altmer, marks him on sight as insufficiently highblood. That, and the moles, of course. Imperfection literally on display.

next: 25: expecting previous: 23: fix

[5lut4ghouls]

My version of ghost lore :3

✦ ghouls can be sent to the pit for sinning in their human lives, born in the pit, or born on the surface- though that's incredibly rare

✦ ghouls also have subspecies, if two ghouls of different subspecies have a kit it's pretty much 50/50 on what subspecies the kit ends up with. These subspecies can also have something to do with what they went to hell for, their element can as well.

✦ when ghouls are sent to the pit time passes extremely differently. Something major like 100 years per human month. No one is exactly sure how extreme the difference is, but most ghouls do not remember anything from their past lives as a result of the trauma of death and the time in the pit.

✦ i also think ghouls can be summoned for reasons other than the band. They can be summoned for things around the ministry or just because a papa wants another ghoul. Sister imperator does have to approve of every summon.

✦ ghouls are pack creature to, so if a ghoul is summoned and they had a pack or mate then the papa usually decides to summon those ghouls as well. Sister isn't a great fan of having a bunch of new ghouls to adjust at once but she knows that a ghoul will literally die if taken away from their pack/mate for too long.

✦ the papa isn't actually the one to summon the ghouls, they have a witch that helps them (ocs i will ramble about later :3)

✦ the witches can heavily influence what ghoul is summoned- things like their element, subspecies, and even the ghoul itself. For elements they usually use some random object related to that element (earth = dirt, water = a pond, etc.) the subspecies tends to go in the spell itself if the witch or papa needs a specific one. If a papa needs a specific ghoul it's a little more challenging. if the ghoul has a relative on the surface their blood can be used. If it's a mate of a ghoul on the surface then the witch usually lays her hand on the bite, same with packmates of ghouls.

✦ ghouls do not have a concept of gender or sexuality. Gender ≠ sex and that's extremely common in the pit. Neos are also common, though variation is a bit more limited because there aren't as many things in the pit and. Most ghouls are also bisexual, any 'gender' preference they have is often a completely different preference.

✦ the papas go to the pit after being executed. It's the ministries way of saying "see? It's not that bad. We're even sending our sons there!"

✦ the past papas then get summoned as ghouls a few months later

[catt-nuevenor]

im very worried to make a critique of your game, but i do worry it may need to be said?

i think you have an excess of Older English words/names in here. for a new person to the older forms of English, it's overwhelming how often a person essentially has to click for a pop-up because there's so many new words and names so unfamiliar to contemporary English-readers. i think your excitement to share so many terms and names is admirable, but i do think it is to the detriment of your story at this frequency. in the same light as "one needs to pick and choose their battles", i think you may need to pick and choose which words and names are the most important to have be in this older form of English and which can be made easier for unfamilar eyes to digest and not be strained by

and i say this as someone who is a HUGE fan of the original game, and whose taken classes on specifically the structure of sentences in creative writing. one of my professors had to similarly reign me in when i kept doing too many unusual names, because he and my classmates would get names like Anastasius and Anatolia confused for one another, which then caused frustration, which then meant people wouldnt want to read what id written's contents because of HOW i wrote it. which was hard to process, initially. i didnt want to change anyone's name. so i did an experiment and kept the old file and made a new file where i was more choosey and had there be more easily recognizable names with variation. so, in this example, i kept Anastasius but changed the other to Toli. theyre no longer the same length, no longer have as many similar letters/similar letter-shapes (as in how similar "p/q" and "b/d" and even "a/u" can look to someone dyslexic. ......that someone being me, i am also dyslexic. i apologize for spelling mistakes in advance). and the story that had the compromised names had a lot more success in classmates peer-reviewing NOT being confused and successfully keeping track of everyone. resulting in a lot more comments on my content rather than HOW i wrote. and i had a much smaller cast than you do, especially with the size of P's family involved. and i still had some unusual names i kept, like Toli itself is still unusual. but MOST of them, like Ptolemaeus? became Phillip. id say i kept 2 characters as their original "Anastasius"-like names, 3 became a "Toli" so to speak, and the remaining 95% of named characters were re-named "Phillip"s and other easily-recognizable names in English that still fit my setting. i heavily encourage you to largely shift back to the former names and keep a select amount of these older English ones. seeing names they are used to seeing (as in common names, not "used to seeing" as in familarity with Myrk Mire) will help your readers a LOT keeping track of who is who

and i know, you were kind enough to add pop-ups to remind people and to define words. that is a good idea! but please, also, use it sparingly. the pop-ups break the flow of reading, they break the immersion. i also like Annotated Books with a ton of footnotes, but there's a reason those tend to be reserved for classics (and maniacs, like Tolkien, i say lovingly... while also realizing his style of writing gives me migraines. the man is allergic to a short sentence. anyway) this many pop-ups is a big ask for people new to the story youre telling. and its going to turn most of them away. again, im a big fan of Myrk Mire, i even love my Medieval Literature minor i almost got (life happened, i had to abandon it; it's a long story), but i even went "this is too much" and didn't finish P's route in Hærfest. and i say that with the upmost affection for P, i loved them the most out of any RO from Myrk Mire. but Myrk Mire is a lot easier to read than Hærfest

one of my newest loves in writing comes from the fact that i have aphantasia. that means i cannot visualize. it has boggled my professors how i could like to read when i dont get that "TV in your head"-feeling of imagining scenes while reading. and only a quarter of them have nodded in understanding when i said "it's because i love the craftsmanship of a sentence". and a part of loving sentences is recognizing eye-fatigue. it's a huge part of why Tolkien gives me migraines; as great a writer as he isn he has a miriad of long sentences, one after the other, and doesn't focus on the potential melody of sentence length variation. another aspect of eye-fatigue is having your audience's eye move away from your text to go elsewhere, in this case, to break immersion and read a pop-up. after enough eye-fatigue, people, unfortunately, give up from the strain. this also goes for overwhelming people with names and words, as i learned the hard way and as i am encouraging you to learn too. so both, using less of these names/words and also offering even less pop-ups than that; and overall, continuing the mixture of older English and contemporary English you already established in Myrk Mire (or maybe experiment with only a margin more of older English). i think you already struck a really fantastic blend your first go around

now, i have actually been holding in this critique for about a month. because one of the pillars of critiques i try to follow is: don't critique the way you want something to become, critique to what the creator is trying to make. and i can see the implementation of older English is very important to you. so i initially swallowed this review and told myself id play it again later, with the refresh of knowing this was how things were made. more older English was your intent. and i took time off, which equated to just over a month. and i still wasn't able to finish P's route, much less anyone else's, because of eye-fatigue. i really think your usage of older English is, while absolutely admirable and interesting, needs to be a lot more restrained and picky about "which battles you fight" as i put it before. because, as my professor who first restrained me put it: the reason his critique was all about HOW i was writing and not the content of it, was because the content got lost because of HOW i was writing. and i think im witnessing the same happening to you too

and i just. also really hate participating during critique day at school, because i dont get how to end off a critique. from other people and myself and even professional critics: i always think it ends too suddenly. so ill end off with this:

i do love the visual experimentation you are trying with Blender. that's really cool, i love the new assets. as i said before, i have aphantasia, i cant visualize for shit, so i love the help! thats something i absolutely prefer about Hærfest over Myrk Mire, and i think going in a visual direction like this is really cool. i also like the format you picked for how the text is shown, and how the text itself is designed to look. visually, you are doing awesome. and im not just complimenting to Not Be A Debbie Downer, if i truly had nothing to compliment or if i was struggling to come up with one, id say no compliment. but i do genuinely like this direction more than the text-only one. im excited to see how the rest of your story looks, literally, seeing as i was unable to visualize anything described in Myrk Mire. having reference is really nice. i like it a lot, thank you

sorry that this may have been a lot. i waffle plenty when im trying to be gentle yet persuasive, and i hope this came off as such. im not very fluent at communicating my tone in text messages, and i worry the same in longer passages like this how my tone comes across. i prefer verbal critiques for this very reason. at any rate, regardless of if you take my critique or not, i hope you have a wonderful day. cant wait to see what happens with your story in the future the next time i check in

In summary, because this ask is as long as it is:

There are too many Old English Words, it is off-putting to this reader, so much they couldn't finish Pléhtin's route in One Hærfest Day on first sitting. They feel the word definitions that appear at the corner of the screen, while useful, are distracting and break the immersion of the narrative. They do like the backgrounds, as they help give this reader clarity in the story's setting. They link their struggles with Aphantasia, a condition which inhibits an individual's ability to visualise concepts. They approve of the text formatting, both its style and how it appears on-screen.

---

I've been pontificating how to respond to this for a few days, unsure how best to react to it. The gut reaction to critique is often to get prickly, putting up ones defences and hunkering down to protect one's own sense of security. I'm attempting to move past this instinct, and honestly, I am concerned the view point expressed in this ask might be more widespread than it might appear.

So, in the spirit of improving my stories and being open to change, I thought it'd be a good idea to turn this into a community discussion.

This poll will stay open for 3 days.

If you have further comments on the points raised in this ask, or by the results of the poll, please share them.

[inventors-fair]

The Sound of Silence: Lyric Commentary

I'm quite happy with the response that this contest generated this week, and I'm thoroughly impressed with the variety of music that I got to see everyone choose! From classic rap to soundtracks, indie to musicals, it really goes to show that there are so many ways to connect with lyrics across the board. I've been trying to do more mechanical-oriented contests as of late after a slew of flavorful ones. Contests like this seem to tread a medium ground.

My favorite overall aspect of this week is how those variations in music either influenced or completely changed one's approach to the song. Many cards had themes that were directly connected to the world of Magic and intentionally shifted the context of the lyrics, but for others, I feel that the lyrics helped drive the card's creation. I liked seeing the ways in which people allowed their love of music to make new cards!

My overall mechanical critique is a reminder about space and punctuation. Magic cards are limited by the amount of characters you can fit into a title, and there's only so much room for flavor text as well. In the real world of card processes, there would be someone who would ask for flavor text on cards that needed them, but seeing as we're acting in mechanical, creative, AND visual space, it's something to be cognizant of. Additionally, I saw a lot of semicolon misuse this week. Semicolons are for separating two like ideas that could be connected but lead into each other naturally; they can't replace the function of commas or emdashes.

But my song's almost been sung, SO: here are the entries and commentary! If you see a card with JUDGE PICK next to it, that means it was either a) in the running and there just wasn't space, or b) there was a specific cool thing about it that I wanted to highlight for the crowd. One, two, three, four—

@an-anarchist-shapeshifter — End the Feud "Time will Change You" by The Crane Wives

I feel a sense of disconnect between the notion of equal pacifism and the mechanical implications. Perhaps the king and the elves are each representative of the green and white here, but then there's the fact that everyone's graveyards are exiled and only you get the benefit. Of course, there's no way that giving your opponents the counters would be reasonable. In that instance, perhaps one compromise would've been to not necessarily display the truce, but also a force for the future. After all, wouldn't you be swinging in pretty hard after this?

Still, the ability to really beef up a board through lots of graveyard shenanigans is just what a GW deck could use against a more control-oriented matchup. Personally I'd phrase it "where X is the number of cards exiled from your graveyard this way" instead of "owned," because it's more intuitive to me. Yeah, it's the same thing, but regardless. And it's a good swing in still! I think the bottom line is that I wanted for there to be a more direct connection between the trajectory of these two kingdoms and how the player would use this to then claim some manner of victory. The intended mood matches the lyrics but could've used a different mechanical angle if you wanted to stick with the notion of peace. A lifegain spell might've been reasonable as well.

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@arixordragc — Disdainful Dragon "Judgement" by Caamora)

I'm quite familiar with the card Disdainful Stroke. I'm also familiar with the cost and its effects. I'm baffled as to why the choice to name a card ostensibly after a specific spell would lead to an inverted effect here. Why mana value 4 or less? Yeah, maybe someone would be disdainful of those underneath them as the lyric suggests, but most of the Disdainful Strokes that we've seen have flavorfully been about dismissing the greater displays of power from those above you. The choice to invert that feels incongruous to me.

The card's perfectly fine, I suppose, even if the flavor text is kinda squished in there. It's a good draft mythic and could see sideboard play. Really, though, the whole concept of the card feels like it should've been built around the spell in question and the fact that it isn't frustrates me somewhat. I want to hear about the decision for that later if you're around and about to tell it.

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@bergdg — One More Light "One More Light" by Linkin Park

Yeah, it's a great little one-drop. Combat tricks like this are fun for limited and good for constructed in the right situations. I like the stipulation for the counter. Did you ever consider having an effect that would do something else if the permanent wasn't a creature? I suppose that the bonus is fine enough for white. The flavorful portion of this card is pretty strongly in white's wheelhouse, and that's something that really solidifies it in this unique position.

What is the value of a single entity to the colors? I suppose Blue would have each individual categorized, Black would have each individual counting themselves first, Red would fight for each individual's brightness to shine, and Green recognizes that each light has a purpose. But it's white's capacity to care from one light to another first that matters. The ellipses in the flavor text is grammatically awkward to me, and really should've been removed, but the sentiment's what matters here. Ultimately a great connection that speaks to the color pie, I say. Maybe not the most staggering effect, but eh, combat tricks are always worth it to someone.

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@bread-into-toast — Weight of the Worldsoul "Good Luck Babe!" by Chappell Roan

I'm always struck by the effort of the art here. The new enchantment frames really make this pop for sure, and with this kind of really wild effect, it's a feast for the senses. That said, mechanics matter more here, so I'll stop that particular praise to tell you that I wish there was a more coherent way to phrase this effect. Coherent? More succinct is what I mean. I grok it, of course, and there are plenty of effects that do this sort of thing, but it's a heck of a mouthful.

Being able to shut off someone's cards like this is often much better than just removing them, though, even if it gets them mana. Sacrificing a creature is still totally doable if it's just got Pacifism on it, and instant-speed Aura removal is a lot worse when it's on a Planeswalker you control. Could "Enchant creature, planeswalker or land" roll off the tongue easier? Is there a tried-and-true 'you must do this' order to these things? At this point I usually go with intuition. As far as the Worldsoul and whatever goes, I like the interpretation of the lyrics to this kind of overwhelming effect. Like, damn, yeah, being interconnected to all of life and nature really can be a burden. I don't believe that Chappell Roan was talking about that exactly but who knows, maybe she's a planeswalker in disguise. I suppose in the end you've got a lot of funky words on a funky card, but it's a heck of an interesting card for what it's worth. 

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@cthulhusaurusrex — Lead Pipe Languages "Ballskin" by MF DOOM

What a fantastic reference choice of lyric-to-card-presentation you've got here. I think that anyone looking at this art would certainly understand the homage, although the name is somewhat... Well, not to tie things up, but it's kind of blunt all things considered. Maybe I would expect there to be more bludgeoning in the connection; as someone who's a fan of the esoteric, it's a wee bit too esoteric to pass the test of player comprehension.

The mechanics are certainly reminiscent of the Silverquill power, and it was a fair enough choice to have the power of language and the rap references align here. The fact that you can turn Auras into enchantment creatures is a bit of an oversight considering how they would immediately die. And since when do the Silverquill care about enchantments or enchantment creatures? Yes, I know that it would be more to the point of having this card work in a specific constructed shell, but unless this is intended to present a completely new leap here, I don't see the exact connection. Maybe if there are more Silverquill cards in the future they'll be able to delve into this space. Other than that, the 'why' of this card is still lost on me.

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@dimestoretajic — Graveyard Smash (JUDGE PICK) "Monster Mash" by Bobby Pickett

It's a perfectly reasonable card that smashes with flash, if your casting is ramped to amp up the crash of nasty ghasts to cash their massive axes and gash the aghast. Plus, exiling someone else's graveyard so that they can't get their own creature reanimated is pretty awesome too. I didn't expect for someone to go with a song that's a little...sillier? I should've expected that more, honestly, it's kinda silly myself that I didn't. Maybe I was thinking of more personal songs for people, more poetic. But hey, maybe there's sentimentality for you, I ain't one to judge. Except in the position whereupon I'm the judge.

And I'm judging that flavor text just a little bit, just because it feels a little obvious for what you're going for. It's not bad, of course, and I like how there's a little bit of that implied silliness with a hooligan horde of graverobbers coming in to dig up a bunch of graves as fast as they can before bouncing. Maybe I would've liked some more of the result of the looting, like how after they'd heard about the security, there wasn't a still shovel for weeks, or how the sounds of tilled earth and cracked granite kept everyone up, or maybe how it even startled the ghosts—yadda yadda yadda. Reanimating from an eff-yours-got-mine is awesome, and I love the name because of how absurd the portrayal is! There's a poetic extra mile that really could've pushed it, but take the thumbs-up for what it is.

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@feyd-rautha-apologist — Ignite the Drive (JUDGE PICK) "Extras (Elphelt's Theme)" by Molly Daisy & Daisuke Ishiwatari

I'm guilty for not knowing anything about Guilty Gear. Frankly, I don't play that many video games in the first place. What I do know is that goblins also don't listen to safety regulations and also, Vehicles don't have enough of this effect—honestly, there isn't any effect quite like this, not as simple, and I enjoy it a lot. Whatever limited environment that this could go in, it knows what it's asking for. Good topdeck when you need that last creature and don't have what you need to power your vehicles.

There's this energy that the song brings and this Magic-themed matching energy that feels aligned even without that direct connection between the nice young lady in the thumbnail and the motorhead in the art description. Maybe the exclamation points in the flavor text are a little much, but aside from that, this was a competitive week and I still want to commend this card for its strength of mood and overall kick-assery. 

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@frognarch — Ruler's Acquisition "C.R.E.A.M." by Wu-Tang Clan

It's a damn cool image, that's for sure. Something tells me that "cash" as a concept isn't the most in-line with most Magic universes, and that's really the most difficult part of this card to contend with flavorfully; the fact that it's the flavor text that you chose is, well... I might just not be the right audience for sunglasses-wearing skulls. What this card sets out to do, I imagine, is to display a more contemporary take that's connected to the music, as opposed to finding a niche in a specific/established plane. And that's fine if that's what you're setting out to do! For most contest criteria, I'm just a little more straightedge with it.

The mechanics are what I really want to tinker with here, because goodness gracious there's some powerful stuff moving around. I will say that there's a small issue in power balance for constructed for sure. Swinging in and getting your Treasures with any kind of earlier treasure support means that you can, at instant speed, snatch up your opponents blockers and effectively ensure that they don't play the game. If this was a rare that sacrificed itself to gain control of another creature, I'd be a lot more down for that. Repeatedly and permanently gaining control of other players' stuff is a feelbad for just about any format. If that's still what you're after, then you might want to secure more hoops to jump through, because the threshold of five Treasures in the right shell is a lot easier to get to than you might think.

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@horsecrash — Wanderlust (JUDGE PICK) "Metal Detector" by They Might Be Giants

So far, Glowcap Lantern is the closest that any other card's come to this effect, and it's kinda strange that that's the case. It's a damn powerful effect, but having to hit on contact doesn't make it any more powerful than, say, Sticky Fingers or whatever. Less so without evasion, honestly. And that's good! Balanced commons are indeed good, no matter what the folks on the internet might say. They don't say otherwise, I don't know why I said that. Auras in limited are pretty undervalued, and in the end I think that having this in a shell with flying evasion would be the best bet. Whether or not I'd play it is kinda up in the air.

What I do like about this card that's commendable enough for a JP is the natural manner in which the flavor text as a fragment defines the aura, and also turns around the song to something that feels distinctly Magic-related. Yep, it's exactly that, that's how we're defining "wanderlust" for green, and I think it clicks in very well. Usually I'm not as down for fragments, but you make it make sense here because its parts of speech are enhancing what's being demonstrated through gameplay. This card should be notable for anyone reading this as an example of how grammar can work for you when you're writing your own original flavor text. Also, hell yeah TMBG.

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@izzet-always-r-versus-u — Trust Deceived "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid" by The Offspring

[image description: a scene through Kellan's POV - on the ground in the midst of the crossfire in Tarnation, vision going dark at the edges, hand outstretched, watching Oko walk away from him.]

Something something two nickels. Anyway, it's a pretty rough pseudo-counterspell, and I like the way that your art direction places us. It's been a while since I've read the OTJ story. With that snippet of the lyrics in the title, I guess I understand it, but it's a little underwhelming for a choice. Maybe that's the hard part about having lyrics for a title—you don't get all the nuance that a longer sentence might bring. But I'm also not opposed to it, and if I'm generous, seeing this card in an OTJ pack would make me pretty happy to play blue. Blue was really damn powerful in OTJ. Makes me nostalgic, really.

The first line is the only one that needs a mechanical change, I think. Were you going for more of a Deflecting Swat kind of deal? Honestly I don't know why that one is a "may," but whatever. In that case, you might want to actually word it like Sideswipe. Yes, from CHK. Because OTJ had cards with multiple targets, the ability to change any number of them would've been awesome. Against a full-spree Metamorphic Blast or Rustler Rampage? Hell yeah. That said, I'm glad that this card doesn't have Spree, and that was a fair choice. Maybe stunning a creature as a last resort is a feelsbad at rare, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, and options are what really makes a rare card rare. The fact that just about all these things were found on OTJ spells actually makes me less inclined to think that that's the environment where you imagined this, but tell me what your thought process was—I'm curious!

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@levelzeo — Let Me See Your Bones "Skeleton Appreciation Day" by Will Wood and the Tapeworms

Weirdly enough, for reasons that I don't have a specific example for, this card doesn't work within the layers. I've attached the link below as to why, but the TL;DR is that modifying creature types happens in layer 4 and P/T stuff happens in layer 7. If you want to change a creature's type, it can't be contingent on its colors, abilities, or P/T as a static effect. Intuitive? No. Rulesworthy? Yes. This is one of the first cards in a while where I've actually had to investigate this! You learn something new every day. And it's a shame, because I really like how this card plays out.

Getting everything to be a X/1 Skeleton and having them party hard with each other is really cool for making the board a bunch of boney boys, and the length of the title is awesome with flavor text that takes from the song as well. Like, this is a skeleton love letter and I think that all the elements technically come together very well! It's a shame that there's not really an easy way to go about the effect that you're looking for without some weird wording and/or targeting and stuff. Small note: you're using MSE, correct? Using "Chop Bottom" in the Style tab will make it so that your FT doesn't get covered by a stamp.

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@melancholia-ennui — Moment of Doubt "The Getting By II" by The Killers

Once more the semicolon of separation comes in to rattle my bones. Argh! Small potatoes, though, for a card that's got some heavy emotions that come with it. I think that there's something to be said for how you've gone about this concept from a flavorful perspective, some kind of lost faith. The Theros Gods in particular being contingent upon belief is an interesting one, because there's that feeling of outsider doubt that makes cards like this that much more profound in-universe, to say nothing of the profundity outside of it. I wonder if the FT could've been just as fine with "When I look up, all I see is sky" attributed to one of the figures. It says enough without the rhyme to make it feel lyrical, no?

I don't think we need to delve into the mechanics as much as the flavor's getting to me, honestly, but I'll do my damndest anyway. After all, it's a fun take on the white boardwipes that we've been seeing these days with the draw stuff, and I think I'm a fan of how it reflects belief as something that can still accrue meaning despite the doubt being more powerful than said belief. Still, it should read: "Each player who controls an Avatar, God, Demigod, and/or legendary enchantment" because otherwise one could argue that someone who controls both somehow wouldn't draw a card. Semantics! Yes, that's a dumb take. Yes, someone would actually argue that if they found themselves in that situation. Yes, boardwipes are awesome in limited. And yes, I do particularly like the inclusion of Avatar in there, actually. It's a nice touch.

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@mildewpyre — Dreamless Dorm/Ticking Clock "Burn My Dread" by Yumi Kawamura

I am...more or less confused by what this card seeks to accomplish. Your opponent has basically no chance to react to Dreamless Dorm when you cast it, right? So why is it worded as a trigger like that? Playing a creatureless control deck that ensures you maximize that value is a bit uninteractive in limited, and with a majority of Magic back-and-forth being tied to creatures these days, having a burn spell that can deal a ridiculous amount of damage for that little mana isn't what I'd call a fun card. And then you have the card that changes life totals being one that follows after that, for seven mana? I'm not sure what the process was for how this card was intended to work.

If I'm being generous, I'd say that playing Dreamless Dorm and then swinging in incentivizes your opponents to block with a little more fatalism in mind before maximizing the damage that your own creatures would do to you. That's also if you're running creatures in the first place, which if you're doing limited, you'd have to do in order to get anywhere. But that's pure conjecture and that's nothing to be said for how Ticking Clock really doesn't mesh with the Dorm in the first place. What's with the name-to-gameplay connection, too? And why did you include flavor text on an Aftermath card? I'll assume this is supposed to be rare, too, but I'll be honest: this card feels like the idea for a Persona-themed card came took over the actual card design. Theming is important but it can't come at the cost of a cohesive card structure.

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@nine-effing-hells — Throw Off the Shackles "Defying Gravity" by Stephen Schwartz

I read one of the books in the series many years ago, but I've never been too into Wicked like a lot of people I know. Never really delved into theatre as much as I should've. Still, when you have a green-skinned ostracized character being unjustly maligned, might as well roll with it, right? I guess that the only thing I have against this card is the fact that I don't sense any sort of "game" that one might associate with the Azorius? Like, is that how a Golgari character would see the relationship? I have a hard time buying that just because it's a specific kind of back-and-forth where the powerful figure(s) need to take themselves less seriously in order for a game to be recognized. IMO the Azorius take themselves way too seriously for this FT to be the best application.

Still, the effect is something that we haven't seen too much of re:Aura destruction, and looking at all the Auras that Ravnica has to offer from the Azorius, I like what the gameplay and AD could do with one another! Getting that sense of tethering severance feels both strong for Black on both fronts, and the indestructible is another cool aspect that I like about the combat tricks Black has to offer. Determination is a quality that we've been seeing more of in Black. Bringing that out to this card is actually quite impressive considering how well the execution flows.

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@piccadilly-blue — Baron Von Marlon "Too Much Brandy" by The Streets

Honestly, I didn't listen to too many of the songs that people had sent in, either because I didn't have the time, and/or the genre didn't appeal to me, and/or I had already heard the artists and could get the vibe from that. You, on the other hand, piqued my interest, and—well, I'm not sold, but I'm far from turned off, and more staggered than anything. Staggering suits this character well, now that we're on the topic, and the mood is by far the strongest thing about this card. I don't mean the mood of the AD, but the whole mood. This character is pretty damn awesome. I don't think it would be a safe idea to go out partying with them, but, y'know, I'd follow them on Rakblr.

I feel that I'm kinda missing the context for where you imagine the gameplay to fit in here. Rakdos gameplay is something that's rather hard to pin down, although having a guy sobering up to eventually pummel you in the face is pretty reasonable. Not that he's the strongest, though, and without that history of -1/-1 counters, I'm left wondering where you're expecting this archetype to go, if anywhere. But is that really the concern of this card? Maybe you're going strictly for mood, and that succeeded immensely. I just wish I didn't have to stop that mood and question it against where the card itself is taking me. Feels like I'm ruining the vibe, y'know?

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@real-aspen-hours — Ghouls Gambit "Drink with the Living Dead" by Ghoultown

[Art: a zombie dressed in tattered cowboy attire is sitting at a table, across from a living person. Both have shot their thunder pistols at each other, knocking cards and shot glasses off the table. The human reels back from the shot, while the zombie only gives a skeletal grin as the attack pierces him, to no effect.]

Was this supposed to be "Ghoul's" or "Ghouls'" with a possessive? Either way, sorry about not having the full spree there, but I haven't found the place to add the [+] for the upper-right on Spree cards. Ah well. It's certainly a functional Spree card, and it's a shame that Unfortunate Accident is also a card here to take that second mode and make it feel slightly more derivative. But deathtouch/indestructible is a perfectly fine way of making combat that much stronger, so yeah, for five mana you can control some interaction. That's worth it for me as a black instant! Not breaking ground necessarily, but it's got what it needs.

Simple cards are then reliant on the strength of their flavor in order to get the point across. Where we land here is the midpoint of having the flavor text not exactly enhancing but not exactly repeating what's being presented via the art. Maybe as a warning or an attribution it could've gone somewhere. Poetically, the warning that's in the song preempts the result (the "would") and as such there might still be an element of surprise. Not so much here, though. I think the quote "Try to match me shot for shot" might have been a better application of the song, honestly, to match both the humor and immediacy. Not a bad connection considering OTJ overall, but I was hoping for slightly more substance.

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@sparkyyoungupstart — Fable to Fighter "One Week" by Barenaked Ladies

In no other Magic timeline could this lyric be applicable. And I actually think it's pretty great here! Do they have movies on Kamigawa yet? I mean, they have cameras and chips, but I don't know for sure about films. I think it's cute enough for me to suspend my disbelief. I'm still a big fan of Kamigawa when I can ignore the turntables and headphones and allow for neon mechanics to be their own form of magical joy. Does that bring me out of this immersion? No, although it's still really clear that the lyrics were what shaped the card and that there was a bit of a forced meshing here. Not a bad meshing, mind! Just a pretty clear point of contact.

As for the ability, historic permanents turning alive also feels pretty cool from a manifestation standpoint. That said, Vengeant Earth is where you want the wording to be: "Target historic permanent you control becomes a 4/4 Samurai creature with first strike in addition to its other types until end of turn." Sometimes you can ignore the "base" stuff, y'know? All depends on precedent. It's a fairly strong effect, I'd say, good for a combat trick, good for combat math. The actual gameplay might not be doing anything particularly crazy, but I loved playing with Historic in limited, and that ticks off a box for me. Having a lot forced into the box of these lyrics is still a bit tongue-in-cheek. Again, I'm smiling as I'm writing this. Take that however ya want.

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@tanknspank — Two-Toned Echoes "Who Brings Shadow" by Masayoshi Soken

I'm slowly learning that the intersection of Final Fantasy enthusiasts and Magic players is a lot stronger than I first realized. As someone with absolutely no connection to the game I'm a little struck by the whole presentation, so that's a good start. Squishing that name into the adventure, on the other hand, is a little forced, and you and I both know that I don't have to tell you twice. Two-Toned Echoes, eh? Look, I'm gonna level with you: it's a weird name for a card. Explicitly referring to Magic's color system in-game has been done before, but there's a reason that it's fallen out of favor, and I think there could've been a little more separation before jumping into this name as a first choice. But, you had to abide by the lyrics, and as far as prismatic things go, I'm willing to envision an adventure-y sensation wherein some figure is leaping over their past and future selves in a rainbow-colored array of joy.

Tumbling Through Time is a fine card by itself as well. Look, overall I think that this card is really good and grokable. What am I hesitant about, then? Something's prodding me, and it may just be the arrangement of lyric and adventure, which IIRC you pointed out in the submission process. "Lost in the Flood" could've been fine—I just checked it, heh—but no, that wasn't what you wanted from this card. Maybe that's just what happened with a few cards from this contest: it's just so apparent when the desire to get the lyrics is evident on the cards, and it's no longer blended together. What does that matter in the end, I suppose? Love trumps immersion. I'm still gonna critique it a bit but only 'cause that's my job.

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@wildcardgamez — The Fire "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel

Just so it's out there in front of this, I did note that the title (or part of the title) of the song shouldn't be what the name/flavor took from. Kinda not in the spirit of the lyric contest. But regardless, here we are, and we've got The Fire here. It's living up to its name, I suppose? It's basically "You can cast two spells, but watch out" which really means "Your opponents should only cast one spell each turn." It's an easily contained fire, that's for sure. I don't think it's living up to the legendary stature of its title or its flavor because of that. Maybe it's a sideboard card against combo decks and big spell decks, but I'd hope there would be bounce removal or whatever for it.

I think that you aimed a little too high here for an effect that's far too abstract for what's reasonable. It feels less like you were designing with the lyric in mind and more that you took the song and tried to apply it to the Magic world in an 'epic' way. And that's admirable, but IMO the contest was looking for less macroscopic approaches. Who's the speaker? Is this the effect or a story about the effect? Is there a plane in question? Mystique can bring intrigue, but in this case it's obscuring the larger idea that the card is asking for.

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@xenobladexfan — Gunborg, Starnheim Gatekeeper (JUDGE PICK) "Wir fliegen" by Cyua & Hiroyuki Sawano

I'm trying so hard to picture the epic art that your illustration is going for, and yes, I can absolutely see the valkyrie with their weapons guarding a withered world tree. I'm also a veteran of the Kingdom of Loathing and that's taking over so much of my visual memory right now. But, this isn't about the art, innit? It's about a pretty darn good angel-to-non-angel ratio and having these cards slam in the air. Having even one or two angels makes all the ground attacks and deaths that much better, and I'd like to think that they're talking to another angel in the FT—to the player, even, as a guardian. I like that a lot!

I didn't think "Untap them" should be its own sentence but I guess we have The Fifth Doctor as kinda-precedent. I dunno, seems a little wonky but not that wonky at all. Really, there's not much to actively dislike about this card at all. The name's a lot longer than it needs to be, and "Gunborg" sounds fairly unserious for a serious card, but those a little nitpicks to be fixed in post. You took the lyrics and you fulfilled the prompt in a way that coincided with Magic's multiverse in a pleasant and almost poignant manner. So kudos to you!

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@yourrightfulking — Stray from the Path "Ghost Light" by TheFatRat & Everglow

Let's start with the mechanics here, which are what I like the best. This card should for sure be an uncommon, because a two-mana exile spell, even multicolored, is still quite powerful. Being able to rescue one of your own untapped creatures and/or bounce it is fun too. Really, besides a complexity spike that also justifies this card as uncommon, I think that there's a lot to be intrigued by here! I'm a huge fan of the various UW tempo/control shells, so I'll admit that I'm a little more biased towards these effects personally.

As for how the lyrics/flavor interact, though, I think that I could've used a little bit of context here. Maybe there's a voice that's taking wandering kids or survivors and schwooping them away, where attackers are punished but bystanders aren't? I don't think I have enough information with what you're presenting here to get a clear understanding of what your card is supposed to depict. Conjecture is fine, of course, but I want more than conjecture when it comes to these sorts of things, because I can't really judge my own presumptions. Upping the rarity and giving a little more definition to the showcase could've turned me onto this card as much as I was wanting, all things considered.

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And that's that. Phew. Thank you all once more for your cards <3 This was a popular week! @abelzumi

[e17omm]

Writing down my thoughts while playing HI3 part 2 chapter 6:

Spoiler free TL:DR; What an absolute mess of a chapter. Were they just throwing things at a wall and seeing what stuck before trying to piece those things together into a chapter? At least it wasnt boring. I didnt have a lot of fun but the story kept moving forward, even if it went in circles sometimes.

Not sure how I feel about the flashback at the start of the chapter. Feels pointless unless its brought up, I just dont see why it would be brought up during this.

I really appreciate that Hoyo bothered to animate Theresa using the payphone. I know its not a hard ask, but boy they sure havent put much effort into dialogue animations for their other games

also im really starting to get tired of this "show us around every single place!" thing they've been doing. It just feels like, dont we have more important stuff to be doing than going on a tour? Like, the forward pace is a crawl. I miss when Kiana was investigating stuff in Arc City and we didnt need to go pick up a lockpick and some food from the local supermarket at the beginning of the chapter.

the armwrestling was really fun at first, but its really wearing out because theres literally no difference between them. I just spam B on my controller. For all 3 of them. Not even intensely. They were all as easy except the 3rd which wasnt a bar but I had to press B and... I already was. "Tap B to win" doesnt have much gameplay variation.

My god Coralie holds her attacks harder than Margit from Elden Ring does. The ding comes like a whole second earlier than her attack does and theres nothing like an adjustment of her wrist to react to before she launches her attack.

Very sudden Litost attempting murder. I didnt take him as the nicest of guys but this is certainly something to timeskip to.

also did I miss something or did Helia not have this helpless inferiority complex before? ... Did she fight Litost in the previous chapter, lost, and are only in Reimu because Coralie won? Am I remembering that correctly?

So Ajita is the evil Entropy person? At least this appearance of her? I dont see why she would appear and tp us away and then go "oh how sad, that girl you just saved is gonna die anyway". Is this Sparkle?

Yeah okay that 180 mood turn was 100% intentional.

Yeah Helia, I dont understand where this came from. This part of your character wasnt there before this chapter, and its not like there was a particulary long timeskip between chapters 5 and 6. I get what they are doing, its similar to Mei chasing after Kiana. But with Mei it was Kiana being kidnapped, HoV defeating her, chasing after her in Arc City, being pushed away by Kiana, having Durandal reach Kiana first and stopping Mei from getting her, chasing Kiana to Nagazora, doing everything she can to find and help Kiana, and Kiana still pushing Mei away and, finally, over the edge.

For Helia she lost to Listost, I think? in the previous chapter.

11. They dont need to spell out what character traits Vita and Ajita has...

12. I want to replay chapters 5 and 6 of part 1... They did looping and fixing the timeline way better back then. Helia's inferiority complex came out of nowhere and is clearly a focus for this chapter, I bet she's gonna do something stupid to try and prove herself, where was this the last 5 chapters?, meanwhile at the same time I dont even know why the 32nd Ten Shus War is critical?

13. That's the second time they've done a "the situation isnt as serious as it first appeared to be" twist

14. They're actually putting more than no effort into dialogue animations. I like it. They still havent fixed all characters turning around like a robot, but at least now there are about as many moments with good animations as there are moments with robot animation. Its an improvement!

15. Flashback chapter! Joy! Why does everyone have a sob story and why was this never hinted at before and why are they revealing it all now by thinking really hard about it? When Kiana had a flashback her dad pointed a gun at her. I sure hope that Helia's flashback wasnt just context for why she fainted upon seeing small Dudu.

16.

17. How did we go from family sob stories to searching for traces of Litost? Did I miss like, a short transition scene?

18. WHERE IS THIS BEEF BETWEEN CORALIE AND HELIA COMING FROM?!?!?! Am I forgetting? Am I crazy? Or was there not this much beef between them before?? And before as in, THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER??? Yeah they had an argument but where did Helia's inferiority complex come from?? Am I crazy or has their dynamic shifted drastically from the previous chapter?

19. My issue with their beef and Helia's inferiority complex is that that part of Helia wasnt present or noticably before this point. And Im not really even sure what triggered it. Was it her loss to Litost? "Talentless and unhelpful" is about the exact opposite as what Coralie described her as. Yeah if Helia wanted to be the strongest and greatest Valkyrie there ever was, I can understand how being "just" an A-rank is an insult, but then the question remains: where did THAT part of her character come from? She wasnt trying to be the center of all fights and the victor at the top in previous chapters, right?

20. This is not the same Helia that we had in chapter 5. It cant be. This inferiority complex is a fucking massive part of her character and I didnt see any of it the last 5 chapters. Im scratching my brain trying to figure out if I missed anything or just wasnt paying attention to Helia enough.

This feels like a new character.

21. This is a new character. Im calling her massive-inferiority-complex Helia as long as she stays here (MIC Helia) since she has the same name as the Helia we had in chapters 1-5.

"It wasnt the focus of chapters 1-5" well then they gotta fucking ease me into it and not drop a bucket of cold water on me.

I would love to go back and check, but, you know.

22. How the fuck was what Entropy said enough to break MIC Helia out of her year long inferiority complex? Or did Entropy just switch MIC Helia out for Helia while I wasnt looking? I hope its the latter.

Like Helia's inferiority complex isnt "Im so weak so I have to try extra hard to make up for it because Im so weak." its "Im so weak and thats impossible to change"

Everyone told her to keep trying and improving and be the best that she is, and her response was that its impossible for her to change and be anything except weak.

Then Entropy comes along and tells her that she doesnt know if its impossible for her to change and that she just have to keep trying and improving and... that worked?

Also wait I just came back from my shower,

23. why is Litost just standing there?

24. Okay, while going around killing people feels in-character for Litost, him spouting "youre so weak, youre pathetic, youll never amount to anything" to Helia REALLY feels like "the writers are making him say this to push Helia to the edge"

Killing people feels on brand for Litost, but belittling them in length? I feel like he would've just said something like "see? youre too weak." and be done with it, but this man is on his 3rd page of insults to throw at Helia.

25. Not really a big fan of the whole "we will introduce a brand new aspect of a character this chapter and then solve it halfway through the same chapter" thing.

26. Good to know that everyone can teleport. I mean they set it up but still. Also Litost just disappeared after grilling Helia for like 5 straight minutes? What was that about?

27. Well at least we're finally back to Helia! Mostly. I really missed her from chapter 5. I think she's an alright character, much better than this MIC Helia they suddenly dumped into chapter 6.

28. Yeah this MIC Helia character isnt written very well. She disagrees with the advice she is given but then does what the advice she got told her and then she still doesnt listen to the advice until one day when she does.

29. this is getting really long and I'd like to consider this the start of the chapter considering that we got all the characters from chapter 5 now, but I dont know how much is left of this...

30. Litost is the most interesting character in part 2 so far. Like I still dont know the end goal of all this. I get that theyre doing it coz otherwise Laylah will kick them out if they go too off-script, and the Earth gang wants to find out why Kiana is sleepy, but like, I dont get the point of this whole simulation thing.

31. Genuinely the chapter could have basically started here after Chexue died in the past slice. Helia is back to what she was like before.

32. Azur flame sucks. Its tanky and has 2 attacks. Seriously? Honkai beasts has more effort put into them than this.

33. That's the 3rd time the mood is suddenly twisted into the opposite. Hi again Litost, thank you for always showing up on your own. We really didn't do much to find you at all. Ever. You literally just walk past us when we arent even trying.

34. We really just switched back to MIC Helia? I hoped I had seen the last of her! Seriously what is character development that last for more than 5 minutes?

35. So we just went from MIC Helia, to Helia, and then 5 minutes later back to MIC Helia having basically the same realisation as 5 minutes ago back to Helia, and now Coralie gets killed in the simulation and Helia is all emotional except, you know, its a simulation. Dramaqueens.

Dont tell me its back to MIC Helia again...

36. yeah I smell bullshit on that.

WOW THEY DIDNT CARE ABOUT CORALIE AT ALL.

Oh she died 6 minutes ago? Oh well, time to dive back in! No time to lose I wanna stay in that night city place I forgot the name of.

What a mess of a chapter. What's worse is that them killing of Coralie in one of the more bullshit, but also completely apathetic way for the rest of the characters - they really were about to just go straight back in. Ajita saves their progress, there is literally no rush. Mourning? Pssh, who cares?

Coralie's death is so random. If anything the chapter was setting up for Helia to die. The simulation being able to influence the real world wasn't even hinted at. Have one of the hologram girls lift a physical vase or something, at least that would have planeted the possibility! I could understand it if Coralie still felt pain and panic as she logged out from the wound she recieved in the simulation and had to recieve aid and be out of comission for a whie as she recovered, but "the doctors did everything they could..." really?

And again, they are just going to jump right back in? What writing decision is that? Yeah they'll have a meeting first but, again, what's the rush? Coralie is basically still in the emergency room. Not gonna take care of the body?

Im kinda not sad about her death, just because I find the writing choices around it kind of unbelieveable.

Like, what will Coralie's death bring that isnt Helia turning into MIC Helia AGAIN, or Helia having the same "I have to push forward" positivity thing that she has already had TWICE this chapter? The rest of the characters clearly dont care enough to even mourn Coralie's death. I guess they werent that close? I mean, they were inviting Helia to re-enter the simulation ASAP again. Do they just not care about her or Coralie at all? Havent they been partners for a period of time before this? Dont they think that maybe they should check on Helia first before inviting her back to the place her friend literally JUST died at? Like, LITERALLY JUST DIED at.

And again, what does Coralie's death mean for Helia? Is she going to go through what she just went through twice already? Is Helia going to shoot herself? Her clear inferiority led to Coralie dying (in her head), so if she isnt going to go through the same thing thrice, is she just going to kill herself?

Do Hoyo not care enough about the part 2 characters to not write a character arc (twice) right before a death that would trigger that character arc?

So Im trying to figure out what the difference between Himeko's death and Coralie's death is, and I think its the buildup to the climax that is missing for Coralie. For Himeko, there is several chapters of building and a lot of things are escalating and they're throwing everything they cant at the Herrscher of the Void and they just cant stop her, leading to the climax of a sacrifice play that doesnt even fully defeat HoV. The tension is built up over several chapters and a lot of focus is put on Himeko and Kiana over those 5 chapters (chapters 5-9) which leads to the final climax of HoV vs Himeko and a great animated fight scene.

After all the focus was on Helia this chapter, Coralie jumps infront of a sword in a simulation and dies irl. Bruh what.

How did Coralie even die? We didn't even get to see her condition. And she died off-screen.

What.

Who wrote this?

What a mess of a chapter. Helia nearly flip-flops between 2 different versions of herself, and then Coralie randomly dies off-screen from an indirect wound.

[petermorwood]

Hey, I’m asking this question because you seem to have familiarity on the subject of German cookies (and googling has not helped me). This is probably because I’ve heard a word for a family cookie growing up, but I never saw it written down and don’t know how to spell it.

So, I’m going to butcher - schwa-ben-bru-chen. (???). I was told it means “little breads”. They have pulverized almonds in them and they are shaped like tiny loaves of bread, kind of.

For many reasons I no longer speak to my family of origin, but I long for this childhood holiday cookie. Do you have insight/idea how I can google a recipe?

Thanks for your patience with this really weird ask.

Schwaben means Swabia, a region of Germany, and "Brüchen" means fractures, so I think what you're remembering for "little breads" is more like Schwäbischer Brötchen (shwey-bisher bret-shen, more or less).

However, Brötchen usually refers to a bread roll as with soup, or split for cheese & ham, and AFAIK these don't involve almonds,so I went through our German cookbook collection - we've got a few...

...with no success.

BUT after all that I have a feeling your family cookie - "shaped like tiny loaves of bread" - may have been a Stollen (shtol-un) made as individual cakes. The "typical" version is associated with Dresden, but there are many other varieties and variations all over Germany.

Here's a good overview of Stollen, which includes how to make mini and bite-size; take a look and see if it rings any bells.

If it does, and you can refine the search, I'll have another go at the cookbooks to see if I can come up with an Actual Name And Recipe for what you remember.

*****

This is the season when the original versions of @eatenbyagrue's family cookies are getting made and eaten, so can any German followers help out?

Vielen Dank, und frohe Weihnachten voraus!

[karanseraph]

Alien robots can have accents

This might be spoilers for The Life and Times of Skywarp fic, but just going through my process in public, because sometimes this helps me think and organize my thoughts.

Alien robots can have accents, because other planets have regions and culture and also because if we encounter them, they can assimilate our language(s) differently.

Also, Transformers media has pretty much always had this as a thing, because, with one notable exception I can think of, humans recorded their voices.

What a character's accent sounds like can differ, like if one piece of media was recorded in Canada, for example, and another recorded in Japan, let's say, then even if a character has a regional accent in both, that character doesn't necessarily have the same type of regional accent.

some non-audio media also calls out quirky speech patterns and accents in the written dialogue.

OK, that's all understood stuff we all know.

Now, I'm trying to think what accents and mannerisms Thrust and Ramjet have when we meet them through Skywarp's POV in a fic.

So, I the writer (and I've noted this bias in the various notes attached to the fic) am writing in English, because that's my language. And mostly it's North American/US/Eastern/Mid-Atlantic because that's my region. But, here and there there may be deviations or variations. The characters aren't actually speaking English on Cybertron, I'm just writing the story in my language.

The POV character is Skywarp, who, like many people, does not perceive his own accent unless someone else calls it out. So, descriptions of the other Cybertronian characters having any dialect or accent difference get filtered through the character's perception.

Skywarp, the character, in this fic, is based in Vos which is in the south and east of Cybertron. He doesn't always know what region a dialect is associated with when he first hears it. He just notices it's different or more difficult to parse.

So like, when I'm writing, I would not say "Nyonienne" is French." It's not. It's really not. It's an alien dialect/accent of whatever Cybertronian languages is spoken in that era. But, I might write that when Skywarp met Eriel and she gave her designation the way she pronounced certain airy phonemes was different enough that he wasn't sure how to spell her name. It might have been Oryal or Ariel or Auriel.

Skywarp knows Mirage, Tracks, Red Alert, Thundercracker, Flatline, and Daytrader are all from and/or based in Iacon, but he also knows they don't all sound the same and supposes this is because Iacon has 'street' and 'spire' differences as well as being a big region with suburbs.

OK, so back to Ramjet and Thrust. Skywarp has never met them in person. He knows of them. He knows they are based out of Unitrex which is generally in the north and has a cliffy Rust Sea coast and is known as City of the Stars. When there was a big Seeker meeting, Ramjet sent Red Wing and Laserbeak as emissaries, but Laserbeak is an older bot with his own fawning skeksis-like mannerisms and Red Wing was a new recruit to their team, possibly assimilating language elsewhere.

I think this version of Ramjet is like if a locally-famous rock star from a metal band (they might be The Heralds or just Heralds?) that sings songs about chaos, destruction, and sometimes romance received some regional knighthood-like honor due to his emotive spark-felt singing and took it way too seriously and acts like he's some kind of Seeker-Rock-Paladin, but it's hard to tell because whenever he's not singing his manner is over-the-top facetious and sarcastic to the point of deadpan lying about everything. But the bots on his team legitimately think he's great and consider him their leader, because he totally signed up for that! Also, he crashes through things a lot.

The Sir Rock Star thing seems British coded, even if organics are more likely to seem him as their mechanical steed than a shining white knight. Does another region have this intersection of musician and public treasure, like if one is an idol singer or such? Ramjet could also be that.

But Thrust is...loud and boasts about how great their team is, but acts mainly as Ramjet's conspiratorial spiritual advisor going on and on about the stars and alignments and the symbolic meaning of colors in other bots' decos and what elemental energies he promises he can sense in others.

Some Thrusts are vaguely Western-like? But is Thrust also Brit-coded but like old British occultist flavor? And he goes about saying every bot is a star and do what thou wilt and talking about magic?

But they aren't really British at all. They're alien robots throwing brutal warehouse raves in Unitrex as a cover to spy on the Titan-building project nearby.

[exiledelle]

FINE i tried to draw the dumb silly missingno pun au i joked about in a response to one of @thatsafuckeduptale's posts

not Completely sold on the design or the little notes atm, but its the best i could come up with that wasnt either Goner/Follower Noelle, Noelle But With Error!Sans palette, or Incomprehensible Blob... also no clue if im ever actually going to do anything with this au considering i havent touched my uty au in a while but i guess we'll see.. some elaboration on my current thoughts though:

- her name would probably not be written as Missing!Noelle since the entire thing is the pun, i personally prefer MISSINGNOelle but i think any capitalization is fine as long as its one word

- IF i did anything with her itd still be a half joke au on my side, partly cuz im not super into creepypasta/internet horror stuff enough to take it seriously

- sketch says she can use dark world spells but im imagining theyd be more static-y than ice, both for a "digital snow" joke, and as a Somethings Wrong (think bugs bunny from scoob and shag, if you know)

- alternative to the static is corrupted sprites, static was just easier for me to imagine and figure out how to draw

- she may not be malicious but she CAN accidentally destroy universes through her powers if it feels wrong enough to her, like a swap or fell universe (if shes going to be an error equivalent she may as well be potentially dangerous, for the bit)

- still blacks out like with snowgrave when she does go into universe destroying mode though, from her perspective she just suddenly wakes up back "out of bounds", never aware of what happened

- she CAN still be nice and cheerful, shes not overly depressed or anything, she just gets unsettled over being Backrooms'd and hasnt fully grasped the whole alternate universe thing just yet, thinking everyones being replaced including herself

- also her original universe Probably isnt actually destroyed, she just doesnt know how to get back, and with so many variations its hard to tell exactly which ones hers (and because she doesnt fully grasp the concept of aus and thinks its just a silly theory, shes not going to be able to answer "what was your universe like")

ngl though im still surprised the sketch came out the way it did, i havent drawn in. years pretty much. it could be a lot better but for how wildly unpracticed i am, im satisfied. now if only i could do digital art...

[musings-on-wisteria]

Exploring The Elements (Via Comparison)

This post is about how I came up with my version of the Four Elements. My variations are not exactly unique, but there are some key departures from traditional depictions that I think make my system stand out. If it’s not obvious, this is entirely my UPG.

Context: While the elements are the backbone of my witchcraft practice and are absolutely part of my spells, I view each element as more than just a tool or an energy, but as a category. For me, each element has its own lessons, its own mysteries, its own aspects and its own path for a practitioner to walk down. That being said, I think they're absolutely categories you can play with. I took the elements and made them more sacred than sorcerous; you may want to make them more secular than spiritual. That's totally your call!

For starters, I mentioned in this post that I prefer to work with the elements as they appear in my life. When I began my practice, I meditated on each element and followed the threads that it reminded me of.

To take Wind as an example, I thought of letters, weather vanes and feathers. From that I could extrapolate correspondences of communication, ideas, omens, change, exchange, favors, levity and freedom.

That's a LOT from three objects.

From there, I applied the correspondences to my life- where did I see omens, experience exchange and communication, feel free? Pretty quickly, Wind's domain became the internet, as well as academic study, games, and travel.

Once I had done this- and mind you, I didn't sit down and write out every element one by one, it was a more organic process- I wanted to find the intricacies of the system. Some of the elements seemed to overlap- Earth and Water, for instance. I wanted to know what separated them, made each its own path.

That's where comparative groupings showed up. Dividing my four elements into two sets of two as many ways as I could was a pretty useful way to figure out what they were and what they weren't. These categories are fairly arbitrary, but they help me understand the connections between the elements and solidify their meanings. You can see how this is done with the traditional four Elements, with "passive" and "active," "feminine" and "masculine," and all of that. There are three axis that I measure them through; Hearth vs. Flux, Aspirational vs. Foundational, and Energetic vs. Organic.

The Hearth elements (Fire and Earth) are physical. Their domain is the solid and mundane. They’re called “Hearth” because their properties are more familiar to us, being steady and predictable. The Flux elements, by comparison (Water and Wind) are shifting and metaphysical. They have influence over things that only exist in our minds- our thoughts, ideas, magic. They also fluctuate, hence the name. 

The Aspirational elements (Wind and Earth) have goals that are either endless- they can never be truly achieved- or which I gravitate towards in good times. When I’m doing well, I focus on these things, which encourage growth, progress and self-expression. They concern the external world, beyond an individual person. The Foundational elements (Water and Fire) meanwhile, are more about maintenance and healing. In bad times, I come to these elements for renewal and comfort. They focus on the internal, the self, the- well, foundational. These are paths that set habits and routines.

The Energetic elements (Wind and Fire) are more energy than spirit. They tend to be simpler, more linear, more man-made and more morally neutral. They’re more sorcery than spirituality, if that makes sense. Organic elements (Earth and Water), by contrast, are more spirit than energy. They’re complex. They like cycles and feelings and spiritual development. They like dealing with people rather than products. (I have a whole UPG around energy and spirit- long story short, I see spirit as condensed energy and energy as unfocused spirit- but that's another story.)

So, reading through that, you can probably already glean a lot of my elemental associations. That's how it's supposed to work- through these three comparative lenses, you can triangulate my correspondences in a really satisfying way.

For instance, you now know that Water is a Flux element- changing, metaphysical, mind-focused- a Foundational element- self-focused, healing and internal- and Organic- specializing in spirituality, cycles and feelings. The sentence writes itself- Water is about a person’s relationship to themselves and their internal feelings, the cycles of healing and development, and spiritual wisdom.

Additionally, that tells you how I might use Water in a spell! Personally, I almost never use only one element- it's much more potent to blend them. In my practice, Water will be present in both a cleansing and an emotional healing spell- but in the former, I'd combine it with Wind (the Flux Elements like movement and shifting things around), while in the latter I would add more Fire (because the Foundational Elements are eternal sources of renewal and self-love).

This has been a long post, so if you made it all the way through, thanks! I may make more posts outlining my specific, in-depth profiles for each of the elements, for my own record as much as anything else. Keep in mind these will be entirely based on my UPG and highly personal to my craft.

PLEASE, please please please add your own UPG around the elements to this post- or tag me in your own- I would really love to see what other people make of these four!