#craft speaks

[professorcalculusstanaccount]

I remember discussing Tintin casting choices with a friend from Germany and remarked how it was odd he often has an English accent in adaptations rather than a Belgian one, and my friend just replied "that's because Tintin gives incredibly strong English boy energy (derogatory)"

Here in the UK there's a lot of weird classism tied into accents. Today accent diversity and representation in broadcasting is actively pursued but in Tintin's time there certainly was a preferred accent to have.

imagine this exchange happens between pages 28-29 in The Crab with the Golden Claws

[recipes-of-the-ancients]

Ah what do we need for that?

Lemme read it out to you.

*clears throat*

Excladust (10) + Mana potion (4) + Amethyst Geode (1) =

Purga-crystal

Just one of these speeds up the purgatory cracking process… tenfold? That word is hard to decipher but I think it says tenfold. Anyways… !WARNING! Use of this for someone who was supposed to die will make you a target of the goddess of death. But if you use this properly, she will reward you greatly for helping her free up wasted space in purgatory.

To use this, go to where the person went inside purgatory. Set it down and surround it with candles. Shoot the geode with any spell, and it gets used up and speeds up the cracking.

Told you it was expensive. Excladust, while not extraordinarily rare, is still rare. Combined with FOUR mana potions (which, granted, isn’t that hard to get with the recent mana waves) and an amethyst geode, it’s expensive!

[girlboyburger]

i was extremely sleep deprived yesterday when i discovered the dragon survival mod which was LIFE CHANGING when you're on three hours of sleep so of course i made a whole custom forest dragon texture in one day about it. and. just for fun, some concept art i made for it:

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Against Lore

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

One of my favorite nuggets of writing advice comes from James D Macdonald. Jim, a Navy vet with an encylopedic knowledge of gun lore, explained to a group of non-gun people how to write guns without getting derided by other gun people: "just add the word 'modified.'"

As in, "Her modified AR-15 kicked against her shoulder as she squeezed the trigger, but she held it steady on the car door, watching it disintegrate in a spatter of bullet-holes."

Jim's big idea was that gun people couldn't help but chew away at the verisimilitude of your fictional guns, their brains would automatically latch onto them and try to find the errors. But the word "modified" hijacked that impulse and turned it to the writer's advantage: a gun person's imagination gnaws at that word "modified," spinning up the cleverest possible explanation for how the gun in question could behave as depicted.

In other words, the gun person's impulse to one-up the writer by demonstrating their superior knowledge becomes an impulse to impart that superior knowledge to the writer. "Modified" puts the expert and the bullshitter on the same team, and conscripts the expert into fleshing out the bullshitter's lies.

Yes, writing is lying. Storytelling is genuinely weird. A storyteller who has successfully captured the audience has done so by convincing their hindbrains to care about the tribulations of imaginary people. These are people whose suffering, by definition, do not matter. Imaginary things didn't happen, so they can't matter. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet were less tragic than the death of the yogurt you had for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, whereas R&J never lived, never died, and don't matter:

https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

Hijacking a stranger's empathic response is intrinsically adversarial. While storytelling is a benign activity, its underlying mechanic is extremely dangerous. Getting us to care about things that don't matter is how novels and movies work, but it's also how cults and cons work.

Cult leaders and con-artists know that they're engaged in mind-to-mind combat, and they make liberal use of Jim's hack of leaving blank spots for the mark to fill in. Think of Qanon drops: the mystical nonsense was just close enough to sensical that a vulnerable audience was compelled to try and untangle them, and ended up imparting more meaning to them than the hustler who posted them ever could have dreamt up.

Same with cons – there's a great scene in the Leverage: Redemption heist show where an experienced con-artist explains to a novice that the most convincing hustle is the one where you wait for the mark to tell you what they think you're doing, then run with it (scambaiters and other skeptics will recognize this as a relative of the "cold reading," where a "psychic" uses your own confirmations to flesh out their predictions).

As Douglas Adams put it:

A towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Magicians know this one, too. The point of a sleight is to misdirect the audience's attention, and use that moment of misattention to trick them, vanishing, stashing or producing something. The mark's mind is caught in a pleasurable agony: something seemingly impossible just happened. The mind splits into two parts, one of which insists that the impossible just happened, the other insisting that the impossible can't happen.

You know you've done it right if the audience says, "Do that again!" And that's the one thing you must not do. So long as you don't repeat the trick, the audience's imagination will chew on it endlessly, coming up with incredibly clever things that you must have done (a clever conjurer will know several ways to produce the same effect and will "do it again" by reproducing the effect via different means, which exponentially increases the audience's automatic imputation of clever methods to the performer).

Not for nothing, Jim Macdonald advises his writing students to study Magic and Showmanship, a classic text for aspiring conjurers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/11/13/magic-and-showmanship-classic-book-about-conjuring-has-many-lessons-for-writers/

There's a version of this in comedy, too. The scholarship of humor is clear on this: comedy comes from surprise. The audience knows they're about to be surprised when the punchline lands, and their mind is furiously trying to defuse the comedian's bomb before it detonates, cycling through potential punchlines of their own. This ramps up the suspense and the tension, so when the comedian does drop the punchline, the tension is released in a whoosh of laughter.

Your mind wants the tension to be resolved ASAP, but the pleasure comes from having that desire thwarted. Comedy – like most performance – has an element of authoritarianism. You don't give the audience what it wants, you give it what it needs.

Same goes for TTRPGs: the game master's role is to deny the players the victories and treasure they want, until they can't take it anymore, and then deliver it. That's the definition of an epic game. It's one of the durable advantages of human GMs over video game back-ends: they can ramp up the epicness by "cheating" on the play, giving the players the chance to squeak out improbable victories at the last possible second:

https://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/03/behind-the-screen.html

This is so effective that even crude approximations of it can turn video-games into cult hits – like Left4Dead, whose "Director" back-end would notice when the players were about to get destroyed and then substantially ramped up the chances of finding an amazing weapon – the chance would still be low overall, but there would be enough moments when the player got exactly what they'd been praying for, at the last possible instant, that it would feel amazing:

https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/The_Director#Special_Infected

Critically, Left4Dead's Director didn't do this every time. As any showman knows, the key to a great performance is "Always leave 'em wanting more." The musician's successful finale depends on doing every encore the audience demands, except the last one, so the crowd leaves with one tantalyzing and imaginary song playing in their minds, a performance better than any the musicians themselves could have delivered. Like the gun person who comes up with a cooler mod than the writer ever could, like the magic show attendee who comes up with a more elaborate explanation for the sleight than the conjurer could ever pull off, like the comedy club attendee whose imagination anticipates a surprise that grows larger the longer the joke goes on, the successful performance is an adversarial act of cooperation where the audience willingly and unwillingly cooperates with the performer to deny them the thing that they think they need, and deliver the thing they actually need.

This is my biggest problem with the notion that someday LLMs will get good enough at storytelling to give us the tales we demand, without having to suffer through a storyteller's sadistic denial of the resolutions we crave. When I'm reading a mystery, I want to turn to the last page and find out whodunnit, but I know that doing so will ruin the story. Telling the storyteller how the story should go is like trying to tickle yourself.

Like being tickled, experiencing only fun if the tickler respects your boundaries – but, like being tickled, there's always a part where you're squirming away, but you don't want it to stop. An AI storyteller that gives you exactly what you want is like a dungeon master who declares that every sword-swing kills the monster, and every treasure chest is full of epic items and platinum pieces. Yes, that's what you want, but if you get it, what's the point?

Seen in this light, performance is a kind of sado-masochism, where the performer delights in denying something to the audience, who, in turn, delights in the denial. Don't give the audience what they want, give them what they need.

What your audience needs is their own imagination. Decades ago, I was a freelance copywriter producing sales materials for Alias/Wavefront, a then-leading CGI firm that was inventing all kinds of never-seen VFX that would blow people away. One of the engineers I worked with told me something I never forgot: "Your imagination has more polygons than anything you can create with our software." He was talking about why it was critical to have some of the action happen in the shadows.

All of this is why series tend to go downhill. The first volume in any series leaves so much to the imagination. The map of the world is barely fleshed out, the characters' biographies are full of blank spots, the mechanics of the artifacts and the politics of the land are all just detailed enough that your mind automatically ascribes a level of detail to them, without knowing what that detail is.

This is the moment at which everything seems very clever, because your mind is just churning with all the different bits of elaborate lore that will fill in those lacunae and make them all fit together.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm about to give some spoilers for Furiosa.

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FURIOSA SPOILERS AHEAD!

Last night, we went to see Furiosa, the latest Mad Max movie, a prequel to 2015's Fury Road, which is one of the greatest movies ever made. Like most prequels, Furiosa functions as a lore-delivery vehicle, and as such, it's nowhere near as good as Fury Road.

Fury Road hints as so much worldbuilding. We learn about the three fortresses of the wasteland (the Citadel, the Bullet Farm, and Gastown) but we only see one (The Citadel). We learn that these three cities have a symbiotic relationship with one another, defined by a complex politics that is just barely stable. We meet Furiosa herself, and learn something of her biography – that she had been stolen from the Green Place, that she had suffered an arm amputation.

All of this is left for us to fill in, and for a decade, my hindbrain has been chewing on all of that, coming up with cool ways it could all fit together. I yearned to know the "real" explanation, but it was always unlikely that this real explanation would be as enjoyable as my own partial, ever-unfinished headcanon.

Furiosa is a great movie, but its worst parts are the canonical lore it settles. Partly, that's because some of that lore is just stupid. Why is the Bullet Farm an open-pit mine? I mean, it's visually amazing, but what does that have to do with making bullets? Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal – the solarpunk Green Place is a million times less cool than I had imagined it. Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal and stupid: the scenes where Furiosa's arm is crushed, then severed, then replaced, are both rushed and quasi-miraculous:

https://www.themarysue.com/how-does-furiosa-lose-her-arm/

But even if the lore had been good – not stupid, not banal – the best they could have hoped for was for the lore to be tidy. If it were surprising, it would seem contrived. A story whose loose ends have been tidily snipped away seems like it would be immensely satisfying, but it's not satisfying – it's just resolved. Like the band performing every encore you demand, until you no longer want to hear the band anymore – the feeling as you leave the hall isn't satisfaction, it's exhaustion.

So long as some key question remains unresolved, you're still wanting more. So long as the map has blank spots, your hindbrain will impute clever and exciting mysteries, tantalyzingly teetering on the edge of explicability, to the story.

Lore is always better as something to anticipate than it is to receive. The fans demand lore, but it should be doled out sparingly. Always leave 'em wanting more.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_than_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt

[youremakingmeplush]

My first project completed during The 100 Days Project! I saw this comment in a "vaguely threatening corporate speak" video and couldn't get ot out of my mind. I had to chart it out immediately.

I've decided that (other than this 😅🤞) I'm going to work on WIP from my 100 Days. Hopefully I can work through what I have laying around to make room for other new projects!

[simplydm]

This is literally what happens when you come out as gay

[prettyinaccurate]

a little pin set I made!!! they are my silly shapes

[shorthaltsjester]

god i cannot express how impressed in general i am with the storytelling that cr is doing with candela obscura but what really strikes me is how evident it is that the storytelling they do is defined by the hearts of those who are putting it together rather than adhering to a specific idea or image of a given story that they want to uphold. there is such a stark difference between the tones of chapter one and chapter two (to the fault of neither, i’ve enjoyed them both immensely because they both happen to hit parts of the supernatural-horror genre that I am so deeply fond of and so happy to see in a real play medium).

there’s the obvious difference in gming styles, matt has fantasy running through his veins and that’s evident in the way that chapter one ends up having a tone akin to something like the scarier episodes of buffy the vampire slayer. spenser outright references mike flanagan in his pre-interview thing and good grief is that so so evident in his narration and the way he emphasizes the themes emerging in the story in the environment of the world they journey through and choices like the letter from sean’s mother that subvert the audiences ability to rely on a character’s perception.

but the energy the groups of players bring to the storytelling is obviously also so important, too. like, even just looking at the groups prior to watching each I probably could’ve guessed which might’ve had a more lighthearted tone. the combination of ashley, anjali, and robbie already would be one i’d guess a more warm/goofy vibe for (not to say they can’t be serious and dramatic, but the tone of the seriousness is still warm and the world that prompts them towards drama likewise feels warm) and laura, despite her propensity for goofs, does tend to be a chameleon with group make ups. likewise i think we all had a certain (affectionate) fear™ when it was revealed that marisha, brennan, luis, and travis would be reuniting in another short form story and that has certainly held up and been incredibly bolstered by zehra’s absolute commitment and immersion into the story (constantly fucking blown away that this is her first real play she’s incredible).

this is all just to say as someone deeply interested in digital storytelling, i am so so enamoured by cr’s commitment to following their own desires as humans telling stories to one another while adhering to the requirements they have as a company. and also if you haven’t you should watch candela obscura, especially now that spooky season is here.

[fiddlesticksmcgeetheunnamed]

okay so like everyone knows that Grian is usually associated with birds and his whole pesky bird bit.

Now, this season, he’s flipped a full 180 and is going full ocean. And people are torn bc pesky bird man but also old fisher man

YALL just make him a sea bird. Turn Grian into an Osprey or Eagle or a Seagull if you’re not a coward.

[aesethewitch]

There's something interesting I've noticed in my spellcrafting experiments. I do a lot of food magic, turning meals into spells and writing recipes specifically for magical purposes.

When a dish takes more time and effort to create, I find it has a greater magical "punch." Quick and easy dishes done with magic work just fine, of course. I wouldn't do them if they didn't. But their effects don't last as long, I've found, and they tend to not have as drastic results as something that takes a lot of energy.

Once I noticed this in my food magics, I started seeing it elsewhere, too. I tested it with my money bowl by going from a single tea light candle lit once per week to a large taper candle lit every day. Not much else changed about the bowl itself, but I also decided to physically write out a petition instead of just thinking what I wanted during the casting.

It's had drastically different results. Money comes in quicker, easier, and in large quantities. I think it's in part because the set-up of the spell took more effort (the petition) and because it's taking active, concentrated care every day (lighting and babysitting the candle). The energy input matches the output.

Now, I do think this means that low-effort spellwork would yield smaller or shorter-term results. That doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Performing a bunch of little spells for the same purpose builds up that effort and energy over time, compounding into a bigger and bigger result.

But the effort put in tends to match the results gotten out of spells. The more care taken, the more effort it takes, the more attention it gets, the better it'll do.

Obviously, this is based on observations done on my own spellwork and practice. It makes sense that effort = results in my practice, since I'm pulling fatestrings and so forth, and the harder the pull, the bigger the movement. So YMMV, etc.

I'm curious, though, has anyone else noticed this same thing? And if so, what sort of paradigm are you working with?

[witch-crip-is-this]

Basic safety/responsibility tips for new witches ✨

-Always maintain adequate ventilation & precautions for anything burning: candles, incense, cooking, etc. Do not leave flames unattended.

-Make sure your herbs/aromatics are pet AND human safe. Check for allergies & read up on ASPCA guidelines.

-Read up on cultural appropriation in witchcraft. Smudging, hoodoo & voodoo, Kabbalah, etc are closed culture. Respect practices that aren’t yours to take.

-Pseudoscience is not magic. Magic is about empowerment, not coercion. Crystals will not heal your anxiety any more than a good book. Cure-alls don’t exist, and anyone selling them is a scammer, not your friend.

-Wicca is Not the only option for witchcraft, & was designed to be inherently transphobic, racist and antisemitic. Try to explore other witchy communities to see what feels best for you.

-You will make mistakes. That is okay. Be willing to learn and ready to accept the consequences.

[averlym]

litany of the martyrs (click for better resolution!)

[recipes-of-the-ancients]

So nothing to get someone out?

Not directly, but as I said, one is a catalyst to speed up the process of them getting out

[tmnt-fandom-family-reunion]

Well, now that the campfire has died down and the sun has come up... what will happen the next day of camp? If the sound of several Mikey's squealing and the faint whispers of paint are anything to go off of... I'd say it's a craft fair! Who will be representing us during this craft fair, you might ask? Well, let's give our new cabin representatives a big round of applause!

Cabin One: @just-another-wren

Cabin Two: @theawesomeninja-xd

Cabin Three: @allyssl

Cabin Four: @trixanimations

Cabin Five: @overthinkingspark-blue

Cabin Six: @the-honey-lemon

Cabin Seven: @hitwiththetmnt

Cabin Eight: @liya4kar

Cabin Nine: @tmnt-reticent

Cabin Ten: @orangepawn39

Cabin Eleven: @whyamiheretumbled

Cabin Twelve: @tmntforeverinmyheart

Cabin Thirteen: @the-apple-juice

Cabin Fourteen: @chessman-protocol

Cabin Fifteen: @probably-not-a-rutabaga

Cabin Sixteen: @veearrifarrariboom

If any representing members feel they are unable to properly represent for their cabin during this event, please send us an ask, comment, or message a mod and we can find a replacement for you! We tried to check with as many people as possible, but sadly could not get to everyone in time.

- Moth and Ally

[solaceofthesilent]

Discovered drop spinning, and I'm in love. I have been enjoying lots of YouTube videos with everyone's gorgeous spindles. Meanwhile, I made myself some from parts I had lying around, lol.

[vasira96]

i haven't been making much art lately but i have been making some lil guys!!!

i started making them earlier this year and i'm trying to finish them. aren't they cute?! inspired by kaypeacreations on youtube