I’ve said this before but I think all sci-fi and fantasy adventure needs a little bit of horror as seasoning. It doesn’t need to be full sci-fi horror or fantasy horror but a little bit of scary adds flavor. Build a world and then explore the fucked up implications of that world a little bit
In addition: Want to make your players really feel like heroes?
Let them interrupt someone else’s horror movie. Create an npc with some baggage, put them in a scenario specifically designed to be their own personal nightmare, and let the party kick in the door and save them from what ten seconds before felt like an inevitable tragedy.
Disasters, hauntings, fairy curses, petty acts of cruelty, nothing will make your players bond to an npc like getting to be the unequivocal good guys.
Plus, it’s easier to scare an npc in game than it is to actively terrify a battlewise party.
For the enemy is not Troll, nor is it Dwarf, but it is the baleful, the malign, the cowardly, the vessels of hatred, those who do a bad thing and call it good.
Thud!, Terry Pratchett
My latest cartoon for @GuardianBooks.
This is what will happen when I die if I am good.
in case you haven’t thought about switching to firefox yet, here’s an extension that will…
- Notify you if a website you’re on has employees that are on strike
- Bypass paywalls for major news outlets like the New York Times
- Change the browser theme based on the time of day
- Directly install third party non-extension scripts
- Save individual browser sessions to be reopened at any time
- Use the TV format of YouTube in-browser
- Make all chrome extensions compatible with Firefox
- Turn YouTube dislikes back on
- Fix Twitter and make it way less fucked up
- Automatically remove trackers from URLs
- And many more!
Feel free to add any other firefox extensions you think are slept on.
(via astronicht)
Odysseus at the beginning of the musical: yippee guys time to go home we totally got this
Odysseus in the underworld saga: the next person that looks at me the wrong way is getting speared
I thinks folks expressing incredulity at the quality of the writing and composition in Calvin and Hobbes are often missing the context that Bill Watterson is arguably the most influential sequential artist of his generation. Like, this is a guy who once told the editors of nationally syndicated newspapers to go fuck themselves when they wanted to mess with his panel layouts, and not only did he keep his job, he got his way. He could have had literally any gig he wanted, and he chose to be the Sunday funnies guy because that’s what made him happy. He’s basically the Weird Al of sequential art.
‘Irredeemable media’ is such a funny concept to me because it’s never used for stuff like Birth of a Nation or A Serbian Film. It’s always The Owl House or My Hero Academia because these people only watch things for children and can’t stand any conflict more complex than Super Mario Brothers.
(via yamino)
Early cyberpunk has this tension between framing a well-argued skepticism of body modification rooted in concerns about bodily autonomy and corporate ownership of human bodies, and being really shitty about actual disabled people because it was predominantly written by able-bodied folks who knew fuck-all about disability advocacy and treated all that bodily autonomy stuff as a metaphor for the artist’s loss of intellectual freedom under the corporate state.
I look at folks on this site pulling the whole “well ACTUALLY having cool robot arms would suck because they’d be based on proprietary technology which would be used to exploit you, and then the owners would stop supporting it and you’d be left to slowly die” routine while clearly intending it purely as an ideological gotcha against cartoons they don’t like and neither understanding nor caring that they’re literally just describing the daily life of anyone whose chronic medical condition is managed by patented drugs, and I’m thinking “wow, forty years and we haven’t learned a damn thing”.
u know what, even if my writing isnt the BEST, i still made it all on my own. like there was a blank word doc and i filled it up with my own words, my own story. i took what was in my head and i made it a real thing. idk i feel like that alone is something to be proud of.
(via noxshade)