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Aeschylus, The Oresteia / Anne Carson, H of H Playbook / Hadestown, Road to Hell (Reprise) / John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van / Richard Siken, The Worm King’s Lullaby

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“what’s renly’s claim” as if being cooler hotter and funnier than the current king hasn’t always been a path to power in any civilization of all time

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i think that in hindsight, people tend to describe origins as a game where your choices in dialogues mattered, but extrinsically, i don't know that's true. there’s plenty of cases where you can say 5-6 wild things and still get one of the two or three primary responses the npc has available. they matter intrinsically because of the impact on the history of the character. even if the npc the character's interacting with breezes past to ask them to run the same errand they would have anyway, the dialogue doesn’t need to make any noticeable change to the game world for its impact to be felt -- it's still slowly creating a defined past, expressed convictions, a particular mode of speech, and everything else that, in conjunction, turns a vague silhouette of something into a fully-formed person. it turns the player character into an actual character.

a common excuse for placing serious limitations on dialogue (3 potential responses, all communicating the same thing in the same tone with near-imperceptible alterations in phrasing) is that branching plotlines expend highly limited resources, but when people plead for more choice in dialogue, i don’t think that’s actually the ask. the value of varied, specific dialogue choices persists whether or not they're referenced again or even able to impact the direction of the conversation. characterization of this kind can be done entirely through text on a shoestring budget, and it does so much more to invest a player in the fiction that addressing the player directly

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Leonid Pasternak  (Ukrainian, 1862–1945) - The Torments of Creative Work

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saboteurs/assassins/spies/enemies are way cooler when they believe in something (this is true of characters in general). romances are way cooler when there’s a truly difficult choice between love and principle. therefore, romances between a target and their would-be murderer are cooler if there is a genuine, present, unrelenting risk that this will end in the deaths of both characters. this post, like all my posts, is covertly about the hidden stenmance

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Paul Reid (Scottish, 1975) - Pan Mortuus Est, Vivan Pan (2024)

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woke up in the circle tower and this floor cleaning mage woman is like "boooo we hate your pussy"

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TIL: The Ogre Faced Spider’s eyes are more sensitive than both a cat’s and an owls, but every day at dawn the photosensitive portion of it’s eyes are destroyed by the sun, and the arachnid has to regrow this portion each and every evening.

via reddit.com

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“Do not draw me without reason. Do not wield me without valor.”

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i love reading old gamefaqs threads. no one gets it except this guy

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some more incredible gary gianni art from the 'a knight of the seven kingdoms' collection :

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Manuel Amado (1938-2019) —The Tower Window [oil on canvas, 1994]

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Alan Lee

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