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I love very specific cakes

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I just came up with a really inconvenient, possibly unplayable four-player game: The Evil Advisor

All you need is a completely normal chess board and a deck of cards that you can somehow divide into an even amount of cards that mean "yes" or "no". Out of the four players, only two need to know how to play chess - those play the role of advisor. The other two play as rulers. At the start of the game, both advisors pull a random card from the deck, which dictates whether their goal is to win the game, or lose it. They keep their respective card, showing it to nobody else.

The rulers, who ultimately choose where to move the pieces, always aim to win the chess game, and also know that the advisor may or may not be on their side, and don't know whether to trust the advisor or not.

If the ruler wins the chess game, they win the whole game. An advisor only wins if they reach their own goal - if an advisor's goal was to lose, but the ruler wins, the advisor loses, and vice versa.

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the fuckin face in that last panel is on its own plane of emotion

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a drawing inspired by some of the first furry art i saw on the computer, 25 years ago or so, which was dinosaurs in bikinis playing golf

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Stories should have in-universe clichés and stereotypes. A teenage dragon rider who gets a dragon who will be his steed for life and is a solid inky black and immediately names her Midnight. He then immediately encounters someone who sees his steed who goes "lmao please don't tell me you're one of those young riders who gets a dark-colour dragon and immediately names it Darkness or Midnight or something, and starts acting like being dark and broody has been their whole thing their whole life."

And he immediately scrambles back like "oh no of course not that's cringe, her name is - uh - Daisy."

Meanwhile the Morbid Broody Dark Gothy One is bonded with a bright dandelion yellow dragon, naming her steed Sulfur and then revamps her whole aesthetic into a black-and-yellow Toxins, Poisons And Venoms -theme.

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I predict a Steven Universe spin-off will be announced!

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Randomly remembered something I saw online and can't remember the exact details of - a translation of an ancient Egyptian letter that a young soldier sent his family from abroad, I think from Rome. While all the other details are lost to me, I distinctly remember the tone of the letter, because the attitude in it was so shockingly different to the way I was raised. In Finnish, the word for "conceited" is literally "self-loving", and there's a saying about how self-praise reeks, and any kind of praise of one's own is downright shameful. Entire generations have been raised with the idea that saying anything positive about your own children will rot their moral core.

And this guy in this letter was like "Dear father, dear mother, I am now here in Rome! I am sure to prosper thanks to how excellently you have raised me. I have commissioned a picture of myself in my new uniform, so you can see how handsome I look in it."

Like... Damn. Imagine raising a kid to be that unwaveringly confident in their own worth and prospects, and unhesitant to praise you as well. Why would you raise your kid any other way.

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idk i don't think it's terrible to joke about common themes and even tropes in poetry and fiction. like some things are funny in the way that they pop up so often and are sometimes overdone & hamfisted.

the problem for me is when people on this site post poetry or short prose and someone reblogs it with a joke and that version of the post gets big notes. and that happens on here like every other month.

regardless of whether it's "good" or not, that's someone's art and unless they've already published it, this this is likely the only place they're "publishing" so the comments & tags here will be the only feedback they get.

and if they push back at all, they're portrayed as bad sports. i joined this site as a creative writing blog when i was 15 in 2008 and over the years i've seen so so so many young writers here play along and laugh it off when one of their poems becomes the new joke, because at least then only their writing will be criticized, not them.

i'm not by any means suggesting that no one is rude and terrible to visual artists here as well but i will say there isn't a hugely popular tumblr trend of reblogging someone's drawing and commenting "lol this is corny and stupid" and then that version gets 100,000 notes with everyone agreeing and laughing.

people seem to find it uniquely acceptable to make fun of poetry, something so vulnerable, because it exhibits vulnerability. there are literally "iconic" copypasta memes from this site that were originally teenagers' poems.

try being nice

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"depiction is not automatically glorification" can and should coexist with "some depiction is glorification and you need to be able to tell the difference"

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Contemporary Japanese light novels and classic American sci-fi are basically evil opposites when it comes to their titling conventions: both titles will be long and rambling, but the former will be a prosaically descriptive phrase that lays out the story's entire premise, while the latter will be a line from a poem the author liked that tells you absolutely fucking nothing.

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stupid doodles I did in a tiny notepad instead of pay attention

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"You're Finally Awake" game jam, everyone makes RPG modules that all start with the player characters waking up to the sound of someone saying "Hey, you. You're Finally Awake."