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Xanth (unfortunately), choose your own adventures, and the Lone Wolf gamebooks.

not allowed to say Harry Potter, but what was your book series obsession as a teen

mine was definitely Eragon

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i love finding out what degrees my mutuals have. like what the fuck do you mean you do law? you’re a doctor who blog

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Typography Tuesday

Will Bradley (1868-1962) was an American letterpress printer and book and type designer. He helped revitalize commercial design and is well-noted for his typeface designs, especially this Bradley Ornaments that he designed toward the end of his life. Shown here are drawings for some of his designs, assembled with a biographical text by Pasadena writer and printing enthusiast Jane Apostol (1922-2016) and printed as a commemorative pamphlet in 1976 by Vance Gerry (1929-2005) at his The Weather Bird Press in Pasadena in an edition of 200 copies.

View other posts on Will Bradley.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.

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OFF Stickers and Shirts

available on redbubble

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The Necromancer's Tale is OUT NOW on Steam!

Ever wonder how far you'd go to get the answers you seek? In The Necromancer's Tale, wield the dangerous powers of necromancy to uncover the truth about your father's death. And after that... maybe get a little revenge?

Enter 18th century Europe in a world ravaged by the threat of a lich who your father helped take down during the recent war. Now your father is dead and you suspect foul play. In your father's things, you discover a spellbook of untranslated, forbidden magic and you get the idea to use it to your own ends. After all, you can handle the responsibility, right?

During your adventure, you'll meet hundreds of fleshed-out characters, engage with a job that helps fund your activities, and ultimately learn the truth. It's up to you to decide what to do about it, who to trust, and how far you'll go. And hey, you might find love along the way! Or at least a fling or two to distract you.

Get The Necromancer's Tale on Steam today!

I worked as a writer on this game, adding voices to characters and narration to plots. The game is a narrative RPG, drawing inspiration from games like Disco Elysium, but in a very different setting and tone.

Read on for a taste of what you might find in the game!

A small list of characters I wrote:

A witch with a personal vendetta against your uncle, the Baron

The leader of an underground smuggling group who really rules the docks

A grandmother who just wants to tell a good story

A noblewoman who would rather be doing mathematics than attending a ball

Literally Alexander Pope, the writer

A trio of Ottoman guards who have grand ideas, if you know how to speak Turkish

A pair of bisexual sailors who would be happy to add you to their tally

A baker from Brandenburg who hopes birthday cakes will catch on

Plus many more!

There were plenty of other characters I shared with others, such as the Baron himself, five orphans who just want to prank their teacher, a crew of dockworkers and their overbearing harbourmaster, and a tavern-owner whose invention might revolutionize her trade.

Several of the plots I wrote for this game involved hard choices you have to make. Do you do the right thing, or the thing that helps you? Are you charitable, or opportunistic? And where are you getting all those bodies?

Oh, and yeah, it's got a handful of LGBT stories and characters, because I couldn't help myself!

Give the game a play, and let me know what you think!

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The Necromancer's Tale is OUT NOW on Steam!

Ever wonder how far you'd go to get the answers you seek? In The Necromancer's Tale, wield the dangerous powers of necromancy to uncover the truth about your father's death. And after that... maybe get a little revenge?

Enter 18th century Europe in a world ravaged by the threat of a lich who your father helped take down during the recent war. Now your father is dead and you suspect foul play. In your father's things, you discover a spellbook of untranslated, forbidden magic and you get the idea to use it to your own ends. After all, you can handle the responsibility, right?

During your adventure, you'll meet hundreds of fleshed-out characters, engage with a job that helps fund your activities, and ultimately learn the truth. It's up to you to decide what to do about it, who to trust, and how far you'll go. And hey, you might find love along the way! Or at least a fling or two to distract you.

Get The Necromancer's Tale on Steam today!

I worked as a writer on this game, adding voices to characters and narration to plots. The game is a narrative RPG, drawing inspiration from games like Disco Elysium, but in a very different setting and tone.

Read on for a taste of what you might find in the game!

A small list of characters I wrote:

A witch with a personal vendetta against your uncle, the Baron

The leader of an underground smuggling group who really rules the docks

A grandmother who just wants to tell a good story

A noblewoman who would rather be doing mathematics than attending a ball

Literally Alexander Pope, the writer

A trio of Ottoman guards who have grand ideas, if you know how to speak Turkish

A pair of bisexual sailors who would be happy to add you to their tally

A baker from Brandenburg who hopes birthday cakes will catch on

Plus many more!

There were plenty of other characters I shared with others, such as the Baron himself, five orphans who just want to prank their teacher, a crew of dockworkers and their overbearing harbourmaster, and a tavern-owner whose invention might revolutionize her trade.

Several of the plots I wrote for this game involved hard choices you have to make. Do you do the right thing, or the thing that helps you? Are you charitable, or opportunistic? And where are you getting all those bodies?

Oh, and yeah, it's got a handful of LGBT stories and characters, because I couldn't help myself!

Give the game a play, and let me know what you think!

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Are any of you stuck in a frightening liminal space between states of being? Or is that just me? 

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not to get too deep on main but did anyone else have such deeply rooted issues with their self worth for so long that they thought as a kid/teen that their only redeeming feature was being “low maintenance” and now as an adult you give yourself guilt pangs asking for any more than the barest minimum in virtually any relationship because asking for things might negate your only good quality which is just “doesn’t ask for things”

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i hate how any career these days feels like you have to also double as an influencer. maybe i don’t want to be subjected to marketing myself

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obsessed with this 1850 embroidery pattern for a repeating coral pattern

What would you even use this on? Who was the target audience? There’s definitely context here that I don’t have yet and I love it so much, it reminds me of @vincentbriggs’ teapot crinoid patterns!

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'The Canterbury Tales' illustrated by Anna and Elena Balbusso.

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Phantom’s Castle ‘Castle Of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse’ SEGA Master System

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fuuuuck i just realized that the future idealized version of myself cant exist without current me being the catalyst for change and doing hard things. has anybody heard about this

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Matilda (1996) dir. Danny Devito

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This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.