A deluge the likes of which God has not even seen.
Previous piles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8.5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
**
"Everyone always forgets the war between the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the horrible bug monsters."
"Excuse me what."
**
A tale of questions and answers between a master and a student:
What is truth? Death.
What is death? The absence of being.
What is the absence of being? All things
How might we face death? Live well.
How might we live well? A diet high in vegetables and clean water. Become drunk only occasionally. Sleep sufficiently. Keep the company of men and women of good counsel.
Why do you speak in riddles? No philosophy unfounded on paradox may endure.
What is best in life? A smooth and untroublesome bowel movement.
How does one achieve power? By recognizing it as worthless.
**
Once there was a great mountain, so tall and so wide that neither its peak nor its roots could be measured. And every year, on the first day of spring, a bird came to the mountain and sharpened its beak against its stony face before flying away. It did this without fail, every year for generations.
Now, an old man lived on the mountain, and every year on the first day of spring he would watch the bird sharpen its beak. When he was very old, he asked “Bird, you come here each year and rub your beak against the mountain. Why?”
“Well it’s not getting any smaller if I don’t, now is it?”
**
“It’s the Gloam-Eyed Queen again! The fucking Gloam-Eyed Queen!” Dr. Tanigawa jabs a finger at the tablet like a drunk picking a fight. “Look at this - they chiseled out everything but her fucking name. It’s damnatio memoriae in reverse. Who the fuck tells their censors to erase everything but the person’s name?”
**
- There’s a guy named Tove Blue Valentine in the Jurassic Park credits
- “Three consonants have simply been struck from all documentation of the language - a linguistic damnatio memoriae. I have rendered these as…”
- Adventure hook: A second book written in Voynich script has been found.
- Lost Novel: Abagula The Lost World and Adventures that Happened There (Lowry, Horace, c. ~1982)
- Lost Novel: Jondo and the Wretched City (2000)
- Lost Novel: Ruin Comes to Uln (1973)
- Lost Novel: The Tale of Sir Jacques de Mont (1843)
- Lost Novel: The Hawk Flies Seaward (2017)
- This place is uninhabitable because the civilization centered there got into beef with the moon, who blasts it with ionizing radiation every time it’s full. There’s a perfectly circular magical Chernobyl exclusion zone re-upped every month
- The rivers of paradise are the Indus, the Nile, the Yangtze and the Mississippi.
- Occult artifact: The 37th Vermeer.
- Proximal, distal, and oneiric demonstratives
- Yithians over here going “well if the tablet is temporally unstuck you can rewrite it as many times as you want and just go back to the moment that has the info you need”
- “If a man should step on your neck, strike him in the heel. If he should try again, strike him in the heart.”
- “It is disheartening: regardless of the amount of practice, my skills have not noticeably improved beyond that of my mindless brethren.”
- Post apocalyptic currency: pre-Event trading cards
- The green entropy of nature
- The value is not in age alone, but in being old and well-loved
- The worms of Mars
- Canoquetla (n.) - a situation where something needs to be talked about, but is awkward and can’t be introduced well. Can be used as an interjection to introduce the awkward topic.
- “A gift from the Golaganiri of Daxun. Donated In the year of the Jubilant Squid. Currently stored in Collection R-136.”
- Class idea: clerics that invoke the gods by wearing ritual masks and taking on the persona.
- The battlefields of Cadath Nir and the slaughterhouses of Ghur
- A five-vowel system: m n r l and schwa
- “You all, and everything else for that matter, exist as a quantum superposition where all possible iterations are both true and false at the same time.”
- A “choose your player” dispenser that provides a set of transhuman bodies themed according to set stables of characters or factions.
- The universe is a layered grave
- Nairobi Interplanetary Spaceport
- “I am the very model of a modern stellar psychopomp.”
- "Your existence is a war crime, you were created to commit war crimes, and the only reason you are even remotely considered a good thing is because we stumbled across the only people who love war crimes more than we do."
- O good death, our brother / Receive her into your house / Into the house of silence
- Kidnapped scholars in the Library of Pnakotus compiling as many genomes of Earth life as they can and figuring out how to program a genestock shoggoth to start making them
- Posthumans created by deep ones, ghouls, mi-go. Tsan-Chan dominate the system; normal humans survive due to Dreamlands?
- Bad conlang idea: all root words are taken from existing acronyms
- “Ganymede STC this is Magnolia on final approach”
“Copy that, magnolia, you’re cleared for docking, spur 4, bay 12.” - Fanfic opportunity: Romina, Godskin Saint
- “No monsters but what we make; no hells but those we build.”
- They weren't called elves until the English got to them. A casualty of Victorian faerie-mania. The Afar peoples called them idaltu - the elders - and this name is more fitting by far.
- Shonen battle series that pulls an early "the fuck were you expecting from a show with child soldiers", kills off the main character in an undignified and pointless way, and then focuses on his mother tearing down the entire system.
**
Novel that Doesn't Exist: Empress of the Blue Veil (2017) - An astoundingly horny lesbian court drama set in a pseudo-Byzantine empire that would have been a runaway smash hit, were it not for the fact that it is also an obtuse puzzle box novel of complexity nearly equaling its horniness. A small but dedicated fandom exists, and as of December 2024 they believe they have solved 13 of 42 of the book’s primary puzzles.
Novel that Doesn't Exist: Lords of Stone (Dugan, Henry. 1983) - A boilerplate 80s fantasy novel with little to commend it for positively or negatively. It is a serviceable paint-by-numbers, casually strolling through the cliches of the genre with no thoughts of greater or better things. It would be forgotten naturally by the procession of time. However, Henry Dugan brutally murdered two teenagers in 1985 and his publisher accelerated the series’ entropy by wiping out all public references they could to the work, destroying unsold copies, and even offering replacement books from another series to anyone willing to trade in a Dugan novel for disposal.
Anime that Doesn't Exist: 70 Years in Sapporo (2015) - What starts as a somewhat typical "slice of life featuring a band of middle school girls" goes on to follow the main quintet through seven decades, chronicling the ups and downs of their careers, relationships, families, and fortunes. Does not portray a particularly sugarcoated view of the future or of human relationships, but maintains a through-line that hardship can be endured and hurts can be healed.
Anime that Doesn't Exist: Asuka's Happy Cat Cafe (2020) - A gag series about a cat cafe / rescue, its hapless owner, and its many feline tenants. It has one joke and is perfectly willing to ride it out: the cats are all ugly and talk (only to each other, of course) like they’re delinquents in a motorcycle gang. That’s the joke, you now know everything you need to know about Asuka’s Happy Cat Cafe.
Anime that Doesn't Exist: Goro of the Road (1986) - Set near the turn of the 17th century. A girl from a rural village is possessed by a demon that has resisted all attempts to exorcise it; her parents bring her to the local hermit as a last-ditch attempt. The hermit, a former Christian convert and deacon (having recanted to avoid death but still holding to the belief privately to no small amount of inner conflict), is able to identify that the girl is possessed by a European demon - one that does not recognize the spiritual authority of the Buddhist priests. Girl needs to be escorted to a group of surviving Christians, we get a ronin to do the job, you can see where this is going. We're playing the hits but the hits are going to be played a lot closer to reality than normal.
Had it been released only a few years later, this would have become a classic in the American anime community. But the film was a flop in Japan and never made its way overseas with VHS tapes of Akira and Ghost in the Shell.
**
Conlang Idea: A language for a space-faring people where directions are compounds (similar to how Japanese forms demonstratives) of a direction and what that direction is relative to. The core directions would be up, down, right / spinwise, left / widdershins, and the frames of reference would be relative to the speaker’s body, the ship’s direction of acceleration, the local source of gravity (planet, moon, asteroid, etc), the local star, or the galactic core. Left and right would have the dual meaning of widdershins and spinwise on larger scales, allowing you to start talking about orbits.
Lego Bin Design
Imagine you have a big bin of Legos. Yes I know that the plural is properly Lego but bear with me. You have a big bin of Legos, well-loved and well-used, of dozens of different sets you have long since lost the directions for. And you get it in your head that you might as well open up the bin to your friends, so they can dump all their unused Legos into it as well.
So that's what you do. You all swiftly accumulate so many Legos that a minor miracle occurs for the purposes of making the metaphor work: critical Lego mass means that you have effectively infinite copies of Lego pieces, in a quantum sort of way, so that everyone has access to all the pieces they want without preventing anyone else from using them. No more fighting over who gets the big shiny drill from the Rock Raiders Granite Grinder.
And from this quantum morass of brightly-colored plastic people scoop out a bucket for themselves, make something cool, and share it. Since the pieces are all available to everyone, people freely iterate on the design, building response or companion pieces to it. And then those pieces inspire new responses, all while new designs are introduced, new connections are drawn, on and on.
This, I think, is the highest design principle any creative work can aspire to.
The Four Who Are One Who Are Many
The followers of isfet, regardless of their sect, call the central tenet of their faith the Great Lie. The One and the Many and the All cannot be divided, and so any organizational schema, any formation of aspects or imposition of structure, is inherently impossible. The division of the All into the Many is illusory, but illusions are not without merit - so long as they are not confused for the real.
The Aspects of Isfet
- Korath - Prime aspect of CHANGE THROUGH ACTION
- Lesser aspects of Violence, Justice, Mercy
- Ngurral - Prime aspect of CHANGE THROUGH INACTION
- Lesser aspects of Acceptance, Entropy, Emptiness
- Salemeshan - Prime aspect of CHANGE THROUGH DESIRE
- Lesser aspects of Lust, Hunger, Love
- Zin-Tzen - Prime aspect of CHANGE THROUGH THOUGHT
- Lesser aspects of Revelation, Hope, Understanding
A fifth and sixth aspect must also be included
- The Crowned Fool - Prime aspect of RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
- Lesser aspects of Hypocrisy, Stability, Ignorance
- Am-lal - Prime aspect of UNDIVIDED ISFET.
- Lesser aspects of Paradox, Infinite Recombination, Fractal Complexity
HEART for Sci-Fi
Skills || Domains
Compel || Core
Explore || Rim
Discern || Alien
Endure || Anomaly
Evade || Technology
Hunt || Computers
Kill || Spaceships
Mend || Religion
Sneak || Atum
**
Scrapped Post: Overview of Kinship Systems
An overview of various kinship structures and terminology, to be used in worldbuilding. Bonus appearance of generative metaphors as featured in _Always Coming Come_. It was supposed to be a quick one, but I found that the main source I was pulling from wasn't really matching up with others and the situation was a lot more complex than I had the oomph to write out.
Scrapped Post: Dungeon Meshi is the Best that D&D has Ever Been
A trueism, but also this post would have just been preaching to the choir. You already know Dungeon Meshi is the best that D&D has ever been, so there’s no need for me to re-litigate this fact; the time would be better spent inventing a dungeon ecology and having some fun with it.
Scrapped Post: Plundering the Book of Mormon
It is highly unfair that a weird public-domain epic fantasy novel is just sitting there primed for conceptual looting, but also shackled to a repressive anti-human religious institution that uses its considerable political clout to make life worse for themselves and everyone else because the idea of human beings being messy or complicated or angry or sad or weird or horny (how’s that for an alignment chart) or actually just living like a human being in reality makes them so uncomfortable they need to make it everyone else’s problem. Whole thing gives me the jibblies. Positively unheimlich.
Scrapped Post: The Conlang I Didn’t Write
A summary of the ideas I had for a descendant of Tsolyani, spoken some centuries after a massive slave rebellion topples the Petal Throne. Dreamt up prior to learning that M.A.R. Barker was a literal Nazi, mind you. Has been lurking around somewhere in my notes for ages waiting to see if time would take enough enough of the edge off for “looting the idea-tomb of an old dead fascist and turning it into something he would have hated” to be a viable option. Time has done no such thing, so this is the exorcism I will grant myself.
Scrapped Post: Planet Classification System
We simply don't have enough data. Real scientists haven't been able to do this, and despite herculean effort I haven't been able to do this: I considered an expanded list of Olympians, switching over to the idiosyncrasies of Roman religion, Tolkien's Valar and Blake's Zoas, and I have come up with bupkis. I even tried synthesizing the absurd overly-complex slot-based classification system of Orion's Arm with the absurd overly-complicated slot-based conlang Ithkuil and somehow that one got the furthest, because I am a certifiable madman.
(I actually lied about this one, I still working on it.)
