onemerlin

[onemerlin]

I've seen the antiques, and I've seen the descriptions, but finally a great reference for which name was which design.

[onemerlin]

[onemerlin]

And that confused me a little, because that's not how I remembered that verse, but it's been a long time since I read it and longer since I believed, so I went to look it up.

That's a small minority translation - the vast majority say, "We are God's workmanship," or "He has made us what we are." Masterpiece? Not so much, only 3 of 64 translations go with that. (https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Ephesians%202%3A10)

I am not fond of the phrasing, and find the inherent supremacy of "masterpiece" (i.e., better than the rest of creation) to have unfortunate cultural echoes. I would be much happier to be a part of all creation than to demand that I be somehow more special.

things you can claim before inventing mirrors

[onemerlin]

Lesser-known steps of the writing process:

Finding all the paragraphs where you used some hyper-specific word more than once

Rearranging paragraphs that you swear you wrote in the right order but turned out to be totally backwards

Going for a walk, coming up with the perfect line, and forgetting it as soon as you get home and open your laptop

Creating a separate document where you can dump all of those nice sentences that no longer fit in anywhere

Waking up in a cold sweat because so-and-so was supposed to be barefoot but never actually took his shoes off

[onemerlin]

Honestly part of the problem with this obsession with only consuming unproblematic fiction is that people are less likely to acknowledge when something is harmful. If you so much as say hey this one joke in this one episode was offensive fans will write you an essay on why it wasn’t. Because they’ve created a world view where this is basically accusing them of being a bad person who has committed an unforgivable sin.

[onemerlin]

[onemerlin]

In like 2006, I accepted anyone who asked to be my friend as a friend on facebook, because that was how you promoted your books at the time. Eventually by 2008 or so, I maxed out at 500 friends.

Now, on the rare occasions I log into facebook, I just see updates from the (few) people who still post on facebook. So my feed is just a collection of marriages, deaths in the family, birthday wishes, and so on from 500 random people who liked my work 20 years ago.

It's sort of beautiful, actually.

[onemerlin]

[onemerlin]

Absolutely fecking brilliant.

I always struggled drawing hands before anyone told me what to do. So here is a HANDy dandy drawing reference to see the steps on an actual hand. There are three big muscles in the palm. The thumb lump is most important because without it you’ll never even get the shape right. Circle up the knuckles and draw bendy lines (red) to connect them. Make sure the fingers go from medium-tall-short-shortest just slightly (index=>pinky finger). Notice the big red squareish shape around the palm-that’s the first thing I do. Note: every infer has 2 knuckles don’t forget the thumb does too…just in a weird way.

[onemerlin]

This is why SF based on social science is so hard to write. The entire point of SF, at some level, is to show the impact of the changes you've made in your worldbuilding, but understanding the impact of social changes requires a LOT of re-examination. Without a deep understanding, the changes that would come are not apparent. So much of our social details are built on the deep structure of society that it's really easy to miss huge implications.

I should qualify, GOOD social SF is very hard. Bad writing, on all subjects, is ubiquitous.

in this fantasy world, theres no homophobia or sexism! but the governments are still patriarchal monarchies and everyone still adheres to the standard nuclear family, two things that have absolutely no relation to homophobia and sexism whatsoever

[onemerlin]

Kaboom x3

Which is the best?

[onemerlin]

Did you know that JRR Tolkien wrote an unpublished epilogue to Lord of the Rings? It's achingly, beautifully wistful in the way that only Lord of the Rings is. I revisited it recently because I'm guesting on my friends' LOTR podcast, and THAT reminded me that I drew a comic of the epilogue back in 2021 (all text is entirely canon). Anyway I thought folks on this website might enjoy it!

[onemerlin]

Possibly the best version of this.

[onemerlin]

One of my favorites, a huge influence on me in high school, and it blew my mind when I discovered that my wife had been his math TA in UC, and that friends of hers had persuaded him to rerelease his albums on CD back in the 90s.

Rest ye well, good sir. You did well.

Gods rest him. May he have found a vantage point from which to view our endless bullshit without pain.

[onemerlin]

For the longest time I opted on the side of "no coffee, potatoes, etc" in fantasy writing, on the argument that if I was writing a pseudo-european medieval story, featuring elements brought to Europe by colonialism would imply the existence of colonialism, and if I was going to include that kind of elements, I could not just mention them casually, it would have to be a major theme of the story.

Then I scrolled past a post on tumblr specifically about "can you have potatoes in a fantasy setting for no reason" that had pics of Peruvian potato farmers and asked "are you really too much of a coward to not write these people into your stories?" (the tone was probably not that accusative, I paraphrase from my own perspective of this), and something clicked in my head, and this epiphany manifested in my head as Gordon Ramsay yelling

"IT WAS NOT THE FUCKING COLONIALISM THAT INVENTED THE FUCKING POTATO."

[onemerlin]

Campaign set in the Cradle of Humankind during the early Pleistocene.

In place of humans, elves, dwarves, and hobbits; you play as Homo erectus, Homo naledi, Paranthropus robustus, and Australopithecus africanus, respectively.

Dinopithecus and baboons fill in for orcs and goblins. Elephants take the place of giants, while dragons are replaced with crocodiles. All other “monsters” are, similarly, living and extinct South African wildlife.

The spell “fireball”, is literally just the knowledge of how to make fire. Artificers are the ones who know to make tools.

­Ok, this is actually a really good RPG with a lot of potential.

As such, blocked and reported.