any-mafi

[any-mafi]

jingling my car keys next to my ear, what else is there to do? Work? School?

[any-mafi]

All my writer friends will eventually get to have the monster writing conversation with me. This will now be a source I will cite from now on.

how to write monsters that actually scare and not sparkle

✦ first rule: don’t over-explain. once you give me the monster’s exact height, weight, claw count, and dental record, it’s not scary anymore. it’s a pokémon. mystery is the muscle. a shadow that almost looks human will always hit harder than a full description of a swamp beast. leave gaps. let the reader’s brain fill them in with their own worst fear.

✦ physics should not apply. horror monsters are terrifying when they break the rules of the world we think we understand. a body folding in ways it shouldn’t. joints bending the wrong direction. silence in a place that should echo. footsteps that sound like they’re coming from the ceiling instead of the floor. once you warp reality, the reader doesn’t feel safe in their own.

✦ chasing is fine. but waiting is worse. scarier than claws, scarier than snarling—try a monster that just stands in the corner and watches. even scarier? it smiles. because predators don’t smile unless they know something you don’t.

✦ let it act like it knows you. a growl is scary, sure, but a whisper of your name in the dark is worse. a hiss of your birthday. a laugh in your mother’s voice. monsters are no longer “other” once they feel personal. they’re invasive. they’re inside your head.

✦ bonus tip: give them wrong appetites. a monster that eats flesh is cliché. a monster that eats wallpaper? horrifying. one that eats memories, so a character wakes up without knowing their own name? disgusting. one that eats reflections from mirrors so you don’t see yourself anymore? revolting.

[any-mafi]

possession horror where the thing possessing the autistic character causes them to behave in a more neurotypical way. autistic possession horror where the thing inside you is easier to communicate with than you are, the thing inside you doesn’t have a flat affect, the thing inside you doesn’t let your body stim, the thing inside you is how you were told to behave and you can only do it when you are no longer you. autistic possession horror where you will never forget that everyone liked it better than you before they found out something was controlling you. autistic possession horror where they know what’s inside you isn’t you and debate whether it would be easier for everyone to leave you like this anyway. you agree. reblog.

[any-mafi]

Mafi.

Why a raccoon, though?

What are you, a cop?

[any-mafi]

The Blood Sword coaches my grandma through dealing with online scams

The Blood Sword isn't going to solve all of you problems, you must trust me on this

[any-mafi]

kill the imposter syndrome in your head because not only is there someone out there doing it worse than you, they’re also using chat gpt to do it

[any-mafi]

Shoutout to one of my party's paladins

Who was baited by our DM into attacking an awakened & very aggressive tree because it 'moved wrong'. A tree that mind you, looked completely normal to everyone else. My wizard was so concerned he acrana checked him for magical influence & I rolled high enough to find that there definitively wasn't any. And so, after being attacked by several of the land's local horrors & knowing DAMN WELL there's a very potent magical threat nearby, our paladin decides he's going to swing his ax at the thing. The Lorax's weakest warrior proceed to have him rolling death saves before initiative was even rolled & dropped 2 others before the remaining 2 locked in & used fire.

[any-mafi]

A setting of mine: "Agaricus Mundus"

Before we begin, this post is meant to host purely introductory information to this project, I wont go into too much detail, what I will do is give you is an outline of what I am working on to spark interest. So lets get into it. Agaricus is a genus of mushroom forming fungi, notable members include bisporus, campestris, bohusii & so on. Mundus is a Latin word with pertinent meanings of "universe" "cosmos" "world", though its not strictly limited to these things. Together you get a mushroom which contains a cosmology inside it. The shape of this particular shroom is that of a bell, with a thick stem supporting it. Supporting it above what isn't known, though its understood that in this case the idea of "above" isn't literal, since gravity becomes unpredictable when Agaricus Mundus's exterior is concerned. Agaricus Mundus contains the known cosmos in my setting, Including the planet of Myr, the Earth analog & the other major celestial bodies & the planets which exist inside them. most of this is housed within the bell-shaped structure mentioned earlier. The largest singular objects in this cosmos are the stars, who through sheer force of gravity, create their own realms to exist in, as they warp the tissue of Agaricus Mundus, also called the aethers, into forming natural partitions defined by the radius at which things would be pulled into the star's orbit. Planets work similarly, getting their own realms which exist within that of their stars & within the planetary realms forms smaller micro-realms inside them, but those tend to be formed by different natural forces, or sometimes unnatural ones. Aethers are the primary tissue of Agaricus Mundus & what make up its inner machinery, while everything else is made up by regular old matter & held together by the fundamental forces as we know them in our real world, alongside an additional force called significance which has its own dedicated post already on this blog. Aether, mater, energy & significance all play a part, stars for example provide heat & gravity to anchor many of the moving parts, while planets like Myr provide space for life to exist, the ecospheres on planets acting like microbiomes for Agaricus Mundus. Though everything works together somehow, it may never be understood how or why completely. Chances are, the average life form will never encounter any larger mechanic of Agaricus Mundus outside of its fellow organisms. Unless someone does something really stupid & ends up targeted by the immune system. The aether which composes the immune system acts as you would expect, only it doesn't need to adapt to anything native to Agaricus Mundus that draw it's ire. This is what tends to happen to any magician or civilization who mess with forces they really shouldn't be. Immune responses can very a lot, from bestowing immense misfortune & killing through bad luck to ejecting an object or person from Agaricus Mundus all together. This is just one example of an aether & the job it carries out. This is all I have to share at the moment, so thank you for reading all this way. If you have anything to comment, please do so, I love engaging with people about my stuff.

[any-mafi]

Agaricus Mundus: The Laws of Magic & Significance.

Hello reader, how have you been today? Well, I hope. This is an introduction to the magic system of my largest project, The Magician Gallery (not to be confused with the trilogy of books The Magicians by Lev Grossman, which I’ve yet to read but have heard good things about) which takes place in the setting of Agaricus Mundus. This system is the most complected I’ve made & so please bare with me as I attempt use my dubious explaining skills. Hopefully, you will find everything entertaining, even better if your imagination is sparked as much as mine is as I’ve worked on this system. What is significance? Significance can be thought of as an analog to the concept of mana used by many popular magic systems in media. Its what makes the magic work, but not strictly by being fuel for spells, rather significance is a force existing in the background which forms as a result of the effect something has on the world. Anything which exists at all will effect the world around it & thus gains a level of importance because it effects the things around it. Thus all things have Significance which reflects how they effect the world. So where does the magic come in? Magic is the art of manipulating the significance of things, which is is the same as manipulating the things themselves. While I’m here, I feel the need to clarify why I use ‘things’ & not ‘objects’ or ‘entities’. Its because significance is not limited to physical forces or objects, concepts which only exist inside the minds of people are also significant, so I use ‘things’ to not exclude them. Yes, it is possible to manipulate an idea shared through out a society & alter it’s meaning. But I get ahead of myself, first lets talk about how magic is done. Magic, also known as The Art, starts with an event in every magician’s lives known as their ‘opening’ which is when the ability to perceive significance is unlocked through some kind of psychological change in the newborn magician. Usually a revelation, epiphany, or as a moment of personal resolve, rarely it can be a response to trauma. The thing being opened is what’s known as the curtain, which is what academics call the unconscious filtering out of significance in the minds of people. I may talk more about openings & the curtain in a possible part 2, as both are connected to behaviors of significance that will become relevant then. For now lets get to the good stuff finally.

How to do magic. I’ve already explained what significance is & how it takes shape, & in doing so I’ve also explained the first law of magic, the law of meaning. The law which holds that all significance must reflect the nature & effects on the world expressed by that which exists. This law determines what can be done & what should be avoided, as though you are altering the nature of a thing to serve your will, you can’t simply ignore the meaning of what you are working with entirely. A magician attempting to go against the meaning or nature of what they are attempting to manipulate will have an increasingly harder time getting the desired effect. The second law is the law of compatibility, which is a continuation of the law of meaning. Compatibility holds that as meaning evolves into something more concrete, it also becomes what it’s not, fire is not cold, ice is not warm & so on. This law also effects the magician themself, because people are very, very significant, a magician carrying on with their studies & using magic, will come to be defined by their actions in the eyes of the cosmos, limiting them eventually to a single course. The practical effects though aren’t usually so extreme, a warrior magician specialized in magic which breaks down matter might have an understandably hard time building something magically, even if they learned a spell which did exactly that. I realize I never talked about how exactly spells work here, bare with me a little longer, I’ll get to it.

The law of cost is next & it stands apart from the other two while still holding heavy bearing on what a magician can do. It is, as the name suggests, the law which holds that to gain is to lose. Magicians for this reason often find themselves paying the cost in magic with things on their person or with things in their person. The act of giving something up, or deliberately making something harder for yourself, ends up making the thing you want to accomplish more significant, thus, more powerful. You can even pay in cold hard cash to cast your spells with, or perform a ritual which takes out one of your eyes, but lets you see things you couldn’t before. While working with the significance in the amounts already present to achieve the effect you want is fine & perfect for most situations, if you need your spell to pack more of a punch, injecting some extra significance into the mix will rarely ever hurt you. Now, lastly, how to cast a spell, the part you’ve been waiting for. The first thing you need to do, is identify what you want to accomplish, which is the easiest part (just make sure you don’t loose track of that objective). Once your goal is established, then identify the target(s) of your spell, most of the time this step will be handled by the previous one. Next is choosing your implements, the methods you’ll be using to shape significance with. As long as the implements themselves are significant enough to be useful. It should also be noted that if your targets lack a quality in their significance which you need, you can use your implements to add what your missing into the mix.

To show how this would work in practice, let me walk you through a quick scenario: imagine a lemon on the floor, which you want to return to a nearby fruit bowl. A simple & easy task, one that can be made easier through magic. The first step mentioned earlier is as I’ve said, you want to move a lemon into a bowl, the target is obviously the lemon, which you need to move. But you can also include the bowl as a target, since that’s where you want the lemon, this way you don’t have to manually guide the lemon from the floor to the bowl.

Now, a lemon’s significance is hardly useful for moving, so you can’t expect it to move itself without going through some extra step or expense. The bowl, assuming you’ve added it as a target, is just slightly more usable, but it’d be easier to use it if the task was keeping a lemon in the bowl & not returning it. So, neither target is really a good option to get something to move, therefore, we must turn to our implements. Like I said, they can be really anything we want, but lets assume we are using our hands & shaping significance that way. If we were to hold out a finger or two, & then move them around like a conductor’s wand, we’ll find that yes, the lemon is reacting magically. Drawing parallels between what you are doing magically & things which already carry certain meanings in the world around you is the most reliable way to make your implements work. A conductor moves a wand to direct an orchestra & all the gathered musicians follow along. You are a conductor, & this lemon & its destination are the orchestra. So, you move your hand, up, to the side, down & up again in quick, rapid movements, & the lemon follows along as instructed, leaping from the floor, right into the fruit bowl. Even if you aren’t exactly sure what those exact movements would make an orchestra do, it works anyway, because your the one at the helm, you know what you want to happen, so that intent fills in the gaps & irons out your spell. And that's everything so far, thanks a ton for reading this far. Let me know what you think, I'm always happy to read feedback.

[any-mafi]

Hello

Name's Mafi. I've starting this blog up as an outlet for myself & my writing & other creative ventures. I'm an aspiring writer & until recently I've been keeping all my work to myself. Here is where I'll host some of it for the public or for people I meet to access.

Some information about myself:

I'm 20 & my pronouns are any/all. I've abysmal grammatical skills thanks to my dyslexia, writing in spite of the difficulties that posses. I've been a furry for a number of years now, though I've yet to actually go to any conventions.

Alright, that it for now, thank you for reading.