The Elf Half

A friend asked me if I worked in an office (yes) and warned me that AI is probably coming from my job.

I told him no, I am very not worried:
1) I have a union, and
2) My company works with a lot of confidential personal info that needs careful handling, and
3) AI cannot do my job.

AI cannot even attempt to do my job.

I do document formatting & processing, and while I'm sure there are AI advocates who think they can have AI do that, it's because they've never done those.

( Read more... )

There is Drama going around in the indie TTRPG community. Some people accuse a game designer of being a jerk, a cheat (someone who doesn't pay contractors, not someone involved in relationship shenanigans), a liar, and weaponizing their fame to harass other people in the community.

Others say the above comments are nothing but hate-speech aimed at a person of a marginalized identity, and this person has written great works and brings creativity and fresh insights to the community at large.

I'd love to figure out which is true, or if they both have elements of truth.

The details are apparently covered in a Rascal article, possibly some posts at Medium, and of course, in multiple Discords. If I joined the right ones, I might be able to find out who actually said what. (I will not be joining any Discords over this.)

I can confirm:
• Creator in question has written some amazing stuff, not only much-lauded but also unique improvements to the TTRPG-sphere
• People I respect (but do not know personally) are calling aforementioned creator a scoundrel and abuser

( My analysis )

I'm writing a Brindlewood Bay adventure based on MDZS/The Untamed.

Or rather, based on one small detail of MDZS/The Untamed, using a modern-AU setting: Investigating the death of Lan Furen. (Adventure title: Lost in the Clouds. Complexity 7. Would be 6, but the death is 30-ish years old, so they're working with some difficulty.)

Brindlewood Bay has a different approach: Instead of "GM decides on the details of the murder and sets a bunch of clues that the players have to find and figure out," the GM sets the location, a list of suspects, a list of clues - and the players then come up with their own idea of who did what. Then they roll. If they roll high enough, they were correct and have solved the murder. (If they roll almost high enough, they were correct but now there is a complication - the murderer is getting away, or attacks them, or someone is in danger because of what they've revealed, etc.)

I don't have to decide what happened to Lan Furen to have it as the base of a murder mystery here. I just have to figure out who might've been involved, invent some clues, and throw them at the players.

( It's been more difficult than I thought. )

From this thread at Bluesky - When people ask how to get into GA SF I always say that the right way is via some of those fat "Best Of" short fiction collections.

Long discussion, many comments, mostly agreeing that yep, the way to get people into SF is anthologies, not novels, especially "best of" anthologies rather than whatever theme-of-the-day was popular. Also many people agreeing that many of "the classics" do not hold up today, and "Heinlein juveniles + the Foundation trilogy" is not a good suggestion for a young teen who might be interested in scifi now.

So... if you were building an anthology of The Great Science Fiction, with a focus specifically on non-SF readers who might be interested, what would you put in it?

( Some limitations may be in order )

Last night, bluesky exploded with the discovery that itch.io has delisted/shadowbanned pretty much all its "adult" games - they don't show up in a search anymore, even if you have the 'show me adult content' turned on, even if you are the game's creator.

They are still listed on the creator's pages; they are still in the bundles they've been in, and the "search title/author/tag" on the bundle pages still works.

Some games have been removed entirely - with a claim that they violate the TOS and therefore the creators can't receive payment, so itch will be just keeping their money thankyouverymuch.

After a mad scramble to figure out "what's going on and why," Itch mentioned payment processor issues on its Discord (which is going wild with drama; it does NOT have enough moderators for this), and eventually released a statement:

We have “deindexed” all adult NSFW content from our browse and search pages. We understand this action is sudden and disruptive, and we are truly sorry for the frustration and confusion caused by this change.

Recently, we came under scrutiny from our payment processors regarding the nature of some content hosted on itch.io. Due to a game titled No Mercy, which was temporarily available on itch.io before being banned back in April, the organization Collective Shout launched a campaign against Steam and itch.io, directing concerns to our payment processors about the nature of certain content found on both platforms.

Itch instantly caved to their "Warriors for Innocence."

( Specific game info )

I'd forgotten how much I love https://theyfightcrime.org.

He's a lonely skateboarding shaman with a winning smile and a way with the ladies. She's a bloodthirsty wisecracking wrestler who hides her beauty behind a pair of thick-framed spectacles. They fight crime!

He's an unconventional soccer-playing grifter in a wheelchair. She's an orphaned foul-mouthed socialite from out of town. They fight crime!

He's an oversexed ninja werewolf fleeing from a secret government programme. She's an enchanted snooty advertising executive with a knack for trouble. They fight crime!

( something-something fic prompts )

I have been reading the TTRPG space on bluesky.

1) Everything is commercial. Soooo much "buy my thing." You might think there'd be a mix of "buy my thing" and "hey come watch/listen to our playthroughs" but no. It's all "buy my thing."

2) It's really, really hard to avoid D&D and Pathfinder.

3) I had managed to forget how wank in TTRPG spaces goes down. It's never just "D&D has taken over the hobby and that sucks." It has to include "people who play D&D are stupid/cowards/wimps/conformist shills." Possibly with a side of, "if people were paying attention to what's good, they would buy my thing..."

(I do not like D&D. I do not play D&D. I have thought many negative things about D&D, and about D&D evangelists. I have never thought the only reason people play D&D was because they were too stupid to look at other game systems. I am damn well aware there is a ton of inertia involved, plus the hassle of convincing your entire gaming group to try something different.)

4) We don't have any shared vocabulary and this is a problem. Or rather: We have some words - crunchy, rules-lite, narrative game, OSR, "role-play vs roll-play," meta-gaming, RAW, probably a few more - but we have zero agreement on what they actually mean, on which games or play styles fall under which term.

5) Unlike the fanfic communities, there has been no serious meta looking into what's changed when a former on-paper hobby went digital. There are blog posts and such, but they're scattered as hell. And 2/3 of the discussion is weird hand-wringing about what people will or won't buy, not about how the hobby itself changes when the rules are on a screen rather than paper.

+1) If there are discussion groups about TTRPGs-as-a-fandom, I can't find them. Dammit.

+2) Don't get me started on the gleeblor.

Yesterday's tea club was virtual, because the weather is icky and I didn't want to be out after dark in the rain. So we had tea - KtE had some kind of chai, and later a lapsang souchong; I had Bone Daddy which is one of the "always keep this in the house" blends. (We may not always succeed at that, but it's very much "buy it again when we run out or notice we're getting low.")

And we played multiplayer games online. Spent some time dealing with tech issues - my audio is weird; Steam decided to switch to Big Picture mode (I probably tapped the wrong thing but wow that was painful); we had to pick a Discord spot that KtY could join later, and so on.

We tried for Don't Starve Together first, because we were hoping KtY would wake up to join us. She didn't, and I have established that I do not like survival games with no point other than survival. We had it on easy mode; I played until I died twice - once to a tentacle thing lashing out of dark/corrupted land, and then... to the same tentacle, when going back to pick up my stuff.

I could've gone back a second time and been more careful: Grab 1-2 items, back off, dodge in and grab an item or two, etc. But by that time, I was frustrated by both the survival activities and the lack of goals. If I'm going to wander around in the Horror Woods full of Creepy Things and collect sticks and berries and logs and flowers - at some point, I want to build a house and set up a safe zone. I gather that's not what the game is about, so we quit.

Then we played Bokura, which I liked a great deal more. I like puzzle games. I don't like pixel art (like, I normally refuse to even consider playing pixel-art games) but this one turned out okay. We didn't finish the game but we did play for five solid hours, and we loved trying to coordinate our activities over Discord when we got separated. I'd love to find more games like it; recs welcome.

I also picked up a copy of Astroneer, which is on sale for another few days. I like shape-the-world games and if I could tolerate Minecraft's art style, I'd play it for days.

I arrived after the first pot had been made but was still warm; we had Dosti Tea because Eldri is visiting for now. (I am about halfway through RRR; we chatted a little about that and some about other Bollywood & Telegu movies.)

Had a second pot of Dosti and then Bone Daddy. Both very nice.

The day was scattered. Our place had been without hot water or gas for several days - the day after the election, our building caught fire (or rather, a nearby fire spread to us), and while it was put out fairly quickly, they shut off the power afterward (2 hrs) and then shut off the gas to check the lines for leaks.

...They finally did the inspection to get it back on Saturday at about 9pm. We have gas to the stove, and hot water now. We don't have a heater, because they turned on the heater to check it and said OH FUCK NO that is not the shape those flames should be. We are capping that off and putting it on the repair list.

(I am unsurprised; I have long suspected problems with the heater. But it's very frustrating because it's only recently turned cold at night.)

Anyway. Tea club meeting was a bit morose and tense, as would be expected. We don't want to talk politics but it's hard to think of anything else.

Saturday's teas were Akito Sohma, which we've had before and liked, and Shigure, which we hadn't tried before but turned out well.

We also noted that Hatori's tea smells medicinal, and now checking the ingredients, I can see why. We are likely to save that one for when someone feels sick.

I am currently sick but not that kind of stuffy nose, sore throat, fever illness that wants a ginger-lemon-mint concoction. (I have called a doctor. Conclusion: It's a virus-something that's going around. Treat the symptoms. Get rest & drink liquids; take OTC meds that seem appropriate.)

I haven't decided if I feel guilty spending substantial time every Saturday traveling to & from KtE's place and just chatting while we have tea and snacks (there are many, many things I am Not Getting Done for this), or if this is Valuable Rest Time so I don't hit burnout.

...I may have already hit burnout. Someone posted a thing on Tumblr about it and I wound up thinking, oh. Those are. Those are my symptoms that I've been wanting to figure out what to do about.

So I looked around online, and discovered the following things:
1) Burnout, like lack of sleep, does not have any workaround solutions, no shortcuts. The solution is DO LESS STUFF. Relax the schedule. Possibly, do NO stuff for a while. (...Like anyone has time for that.)
2) Also like lack of sleep, recovery is long and slow and may not ever reach pre-burnout levels of productivity.
3) Aaaaaallllll the job-related news, psych, and listicle sites believe "burnout" is related to having a paying job; whatever level of "I have been overwhelmed for so long that I am now numb and just going through the motions" that SAHMs get, gets no mention in those articles despite sharing a fuckton of symptoms with people who work 60-hour weeks and are expected to be on call at night for multiple years.
4) "Mom Burnout" does have its own collection of articles, including some handwavy notes that this can be a medical problem. These do not connect to the business side of things. You are apparently allowed to have one or the other form of burnout; having both a job and home responsibilities is not actually possible, or it doesn't lead to stress, or something like that.

(It is really, really weird how solid the schism is.)

5) The "tips and fixes" articles for mom burnout almost never include "demand that your partner do half of the laundry." They're all about taking breaks, scheduling downtime, keeping ties with supportive friends, and getting a hobby. Sometimes they mention "discuss the issue with your partner" just like the job ones say "discuss the issue with your manager."

Chronic burnout is recognized as a problem; solutions offered are individualistic ("have you tried mindfulness exercises? we have an app!") and based on "coping" rather than "here is how to rearrange your whole life's priorities so you're not caught in something that will push you to burnout" much less "here is what needs to change in society-at-large so that burnout become a rare thing among hyper-focused people, rather than a common result of having such diverse and draining hobbies as 'a job' and 'a family.'"

Anyway. While I'm trying to sort out what level of burnout I have had, and potentially still have, I think I'm going to continue to attend tea parties.