Merely Mine - Tumblr Posts
Cinderella shanked the fairy godmother with a glass spear. She wears glass armour. Seems like she's on the warpath. Who wants to bet this is an elaborate setup for a joke about a glass cannon
not a secret not a problem but a secret third thing (your age)
Rian Johnson: maybe she's born with it
JJ Abrams: maybe it's palpatine
2023 year of social networks that are social like sitting on the sofa together quietly being in each other's company, not social like a networking event. Down with the town square, up with the cosy den. Hang out with me on Storygraph and Letterboxd and Duolingo and let's absorb each other's updates and respond with the online version of a moment of eye contact and a half smile
Who's got your attention at the table?
At Dragonmeet in December, I played a game of galactic (2nd edition) by riley rethal with a group of five other players, none of whom I'd met before. I've played galactic before with Merely Roleplayers, and played a few other games in the same style, but with this group I noticed something I've never noticed before about cooperative roleplaying games.
This player wasn't missing everything. When I established a detail or an event, that seemed to sink in. It was only the other players' contributions they kept missing.
Keep reading
This is true: the Wolf is Death, The End, Endings.
This is true: the Authors have of late taken to changing the Wolf.
This is surmise: the Authors no longer see the value of Endings.
This is surmise: the Goose and Gander are trends, tastes. Sometimes our tastes turn to the grimdark and gritty, sometimes to the bright and hopeful.
This is true: something is preventing the Gander from moving on from the Neverafter.
This is surmise: something wants the Neverafter to remain in Times of Shadow and never know Times of Plenty. And the Authors never want it to End.
The question with The Wizard, The Witch and the Wild One was always going to be "which worldbuilding detail will I find to fixate on", not "will I find something to fixate on", and the results are in:
it's the naming conventions
In Suvi's corner of the story so far we've had Soft, Stone, Steel, Archmage Silence, and Silver ... and Suvirin.
It's a clear convention but has not yet been lampshaded by any of the cast, which is of course delicious.
Is it an Empire convention, a Citadel one, a wizardly one? I'm guessing Citadel/wizard, since people like Roselyn and Grandmother Wren are presumably Empire citizens but don't follow the convention.
But is it something adopted later in life? Because Suvi follows the initial S but otherwise breaks the convention of the name being a dictionary word. Will she be expected to pick – or be bestowed with – a dictionary S-word when she's no longer an apprentice, is that it?
And if so ... what will it be? Sand? (sort of combines Soft + Stone)
OR did Soft and Stone break convention when they named their daughter?
Andor: every one of these fascists is pathetic and deserves a beating
The Mandalorian: don't you feel sorry for the widdle lost fascist who can't follow his heart's desire to do a eugenics
The existence of:
licence to kill
marriage license
imply the existence of:
licence to fuck
Miguel O'Hara believes forgiving student loans wouldn't be fair to everyone who's already paid theirs off
guardrails for kobolds are like tripwires for elves. this dungeon is very safe actually it's just our regs weren't written for beings of your stature
I've been looking for excuses to bring out my Spindlewheel deck since it arrived, and I keep not being able to make it to the london indie rpg meet, so I did a quick character creation spread to flesh out a character in the serial fiction I'm publishing on my newsletter! Spindlewheelies will see with a single glance at the spread that this character is a mess
The September issue of the Foggy Outline newsletter is out! Our serial continues with part 3, which sheds a little more light on what Callum's doing at this party, and why no one there has been paying him any attention (even as he rifles their purses and snoops through their wardrobes).
running order
prologue: generating a character with Spindlewheel
tonight's performance: in which Mari is late to the party
asides: what's new with Merely Roleplayers, what else I'm making and enjoying, #pinspiration
fin: oracles and divination
My episode is out today!!
It has a spellsmith, a war-liege, a hero, and an object lesson, poorly taught. Contains violence and death.
Transcript (Google Docs)
Swordtember is a podcast this year*
It's called Of The Sword. There'll be an episode every day in September – each one is a short story with a unique sword through its heart. It's produced by Tal Minear (of Someone Dies In This Elevator) and Ezra J. Wayne. And I wrote one of the stories, Driving The Point Home; it'll be the episode released on 19 September!
If you can't wait til then, you can get all Of The Sword episodes early and ad-free by donating to Tal's Ko-fi. All cash raised goes to The National Center for Transgender Equality:
Of the Sword isn't popping up in searches in all the podcast apps just yet (too fresh!), but you should still be able to subscribe by copying and pasting the feed address into the search bar: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/ofthesword
For the full episode list and transcripts, head to the Of The Sword website:
*As well as the usual art-prompt Swordtember, not instead of!
Do you ever think about how there's a Bond movie called Octopussy and they just got away with calling it that
"You could yell in this woman’s face,”
said Anton, chinning at an elderly passer-by approaching with the help of a wheeled shopping bag.
“She wouldn’t notice. Wouldn’t hear anything.”
“You could spit on her?”
“She’d feel that,” said Callum. “If I time it right, she’ll decide you must have done it.”
A Net Too Wide to Break His Fall, chapter 9: Hypothesis, experiment, conclusion
Ready: Things that go Boom
The Ready edition of Ready & Waiting, the Foggy Outline newsletter, is out today – with:
🥫 Who's pitching at Interactive Soup, the community funding event where @merelymatt volunteers
🗣️ A review of our flagship environmental literacy course
🔫 An explosive new chapter of A Net Too Wide to Break His Fall, where Callum gets to know one of his new acquaintances ... but they also get the measure of him.
The thing I get most in my head about, reliably, is asking people for things. More especially asking people to do things for me.
It'll be an annoyance.
Even if it's nothing major. Even if it's something they've happily done a hundred times before.
It'll be an imposition.
Even if I know they love me. Even if it would make me happy if they asked the same thing of me.
It's kind of exploitation if you think about it.
Even if it's a work thing, and they're being paid to do it and I'm being paid to ask them to do it.
I can anticipate the spiral, and I build in time to navigate the spiral before the thing needs doing, and I can reliably break out of the spiral once I'm in it, but the spiral still always happens.
I think that's why I wrote I Need A Miracle.
It wasn't an intention I set out with consciously: to get into character as a variety of people who want and who find it in themselves to ask, even when the things they want are vast and life-changing; when they are, unquestioningly, imposing. But looking back at the finished scripts now, as casting gets under way and I start to think about how I launch and talk about the show later this year, I can see more clearly why, out of all the possibilities, this was the concept that bubbled to the top and demanded to be written first.
Every character in I Need A Miracle does nothing but want. That's the concept: every episode is a prayer, a plea to a higher power for divine intervention. We never hear anything beyond these pleas, these prayers. Anyone who doesn't want anything won't pray for anything, so we'll never hear their voice.
There's an idea that all characters in drama must want something. Here, though, the wanting is front and centre. It's not just what's driving their decisions and actions. It's the reason they're speaking to us. They're all forced to articulate what they want – and not only that but justify why they deserve to get it, because not all prayers are granted.
That ought to have been hard to write, for someone like me who's embarrassed to want things, and who's shy about making those desires someone else's problem or responsibility.
But it wasn't hard. When it's someone else's desire, it's easy! Of course they deserve it. It's not even that big an ask. Anyone would be happy to oblige.
That's the quickest, most effective way I've found to break out of the spiral. Think: if someone else asked this of me, would I think it was rude, or an imposition, or overstepping the mark? Nine times out of ten the answer is: no, I'd actually be stoked to be asked.