mockramblings

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The sword of your soul, maybe. The sword of my soul wants to sit on the couch beside me and watch horror movies and think how much better so many of them would be if they characters had just brought blades.

Put that sword back!

No, you can't borrow that for cutting practice, son. That's my emotional support katana.

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In the D&D campaign I'm running with my wife's siblings, one of them learned about how trolls regenerate within minutes of any damage not caused by fire or acid, and then asked why people don't just like. Cage them and eat them, forever. Why there aren't troll meat dungeons in the king's castle as a safeguard against sieges or famines.

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Anyway I'm passing this on because this is my new troll lore and I want it to become canonized in the way that all D&D lore becomes canonized: By having eople read it and go "oh, neat" then start doing that too.

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mom said it's my turn to hand out the ominous and vague warnings

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The sigil was drawn in salt and ash, the candles lit at the pentagram points, the incantation declaimed.

There was a shimmer - a demon appeared.

"Curious. What ritual is this?"

"I got it from ChatGPT. I included all protections in my prompt!"

"I see," the demon said and stepped out of the sigil.

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The empire is falling and the world is tipping into climate collapse, but I still have to go to work, God damn it.

the worst part about grief is that it feels like the world should be horrendously earth shatteringly changed, and to an extent it IS but its also the same. to everyone else it's just another tuesday. the world moves on. you have to go grocery shopping.

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I'm sorry, professor, I consider publishing your course a day late, having a mandatory live zoom meeting during business hours to stay enrolled for an asynchronous class, and requiring students to use a $60 ***pdf*** that you wrote as their textbook to be exceptionally unprofessional and since I've still got 14 days to get a refund I'm totally not paying $150 to take your class.

Also, for all the newbie professors out there: a syllabus is not just a greeting and a list of assignments. If you haven't given your students AT LEAST your office hours, your late work policy, and your preferred method of being contacted, then you have not given your students a syllabus it's just sparkling announcements.

But really. Sir. SIR. You teach Speech 100. This is one of the most basic classes with like, 20 of the most widely available accepted textbooks and you want me to pay sixty dollars for a pdf of a book that you rewrite every semester so that there are no previous editions?

Buddy this is interpersonal communication, not introductory rhetoric. Why is one of your *four* total assignments about Socrates?

Maybe it's the fact that I've taken Spch 100 interpersonal communication three times already, maybe it's the fact that I grew up with somebody who taught Spch 100 interpersonal communication from 1981 to 2018, but buddy what the fuck are you doing?

"Some of our lectures will only be available for 24 hours so it is up to you to stay on top of it."

Friend, you are teaching an asynchronous online 100-level class at a community college during a pandemic. Get off your high horse, a third of your students are probably parents. There is no reason whatsoever to limit access to course materials to 24 hours unless you are doing it to be a controlling asshole.

Also YOU published your class a day and a half late! You don't get to publish your class late with an incomplete syllabus and tell students to "stay on top of it." Especially not since that means that people have two fewer days to buy your PDF textbook and only one full day to prepare for your mandatory 1pm on a Tuesday zoom meeting!

Why do you require me to have access to a printer for an online class? Oh yeah it's because you expect me to print out and draw on sections of your $60 ebook.

SIR. No thank you.

Kids, new students: this is a level of bullshit and disorganization from a professor that you do not have to put up with. This is a neatly ordered series of red flags that say "this professor is going to be absolutely unbearable."

Also *any* humanities class where your whole grade is 4 assignments should get serious side-eye. You should be able to pass most 100 level humanities classes by just turning in weekly assignments. 4 assignments means that by the time you figure out how the professor grades you're probably close to halfway through the class. Look for classes that require weekly participation as a major chunk of the grade because that way, even if you fuck up a project in a major way, just showing up can save your ass.

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I love these! I need a couple for my desk...

Painted mouths (sculpted with super sculpey)

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Put that sword back!

No, you can't borrow that for cutting practice, son. That's my emotional support katana.

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it’s always “what were YOU doing at the devil’s sacrament” and “you’re covered in blood” and never how was the devil’s sacrament the devil’s sacrament looked fun was it fun

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I'm hunting through the Phangs Masterfile as I continue to rejigger the timeline and I found this:

and aha, ha, ha, hm. Well, isn't that uncomfortable?

I wonder when I wrote this again...

Oh.

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Life During Interesting Times

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Honestly :award-losing author" sounds to me like you maybe need to check that box in the back of the closet.

I should look into how to apply for awards and stuff so I can describe myself as an "award losing author". That would be super fun. I could get a tshirt made.

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(x)

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Never worry about whether it makes sense, worry about whether it makes you horny.

writing tip #3848:

if you ever start to think you should stop working on a story because it doesn't make sense, IGNORE IT, for that is the devil talking