Mrs.Platypus

She is a shining example of the Not Like Other Girls trope, she is "romantically pursued" by a grown man at 15 (I think), and she gets her brilliant mind scrambled when she stops being relevant to the plot. Truly a pinnacle of writing a female character.

I had a flashback to Arkady Darell eavesdropping on her father's conversation in a setting barely distinguishable from 1950s American suburbia in Foundation.

And then I remembered that a while later in the story she had to flee a grown man who wanted to marry her, when she was around 14? Yeesh.

THIS! The same thing happens with music and to a lesser extent movies/TV.

Question for the Timeless Classics crowd - can you also recommend ANYTHING published in the last 10 years? If you can't, not a single title, sit down. You don't know the genre, you know the history of the genre.

Come on, Foundation has like 3.5 female characters of any significance, and they are NOT written well.

And being ahead of its time still means the descriptions of how societies and relationships work felt stilted and not relatable at all when I first read it. In the late 90s. Almost 30 years ago.

Now that's a good list

What are four albums that would serve as an introduction to your tastes?

1. Have they SEEN your art before?

2. When you see an artist you like posting something you don't vibe with, you can just scroll past it. Without letting everyone know what you think about it. It's not just allowed, it's strongly recommended.

A person who REALLY wants to be the main character. They will be bored outside of their own turn, they will be a bad loser when something goes wrong, step on other players' moments, demand the best loot, be disappointed when a reward is not tailor-made for them, and if all fails, they'll cheat.

Yes, Mothership. Where stealth is not something you roll, your success depends on how you interact with the environment and on fictional positioning. Social interactions work the same way.

I think having a narrative procedure here is much more satisfying than any numerical mechanic would be.

This is what I prefer to do too. There are some very cool things that you can do with Role and other more robust VTTs, but the setup is tedious and becomes the one part of prep that's just NOT FUN at all, in a way that demotivates me.

The basic advert for DIE: Loaded - a big ol' bear witha. woman crawling out of its mouth, with a fox at her feet. Out November 12th.

DIE: Loaded has just been announced, where @stephaniehans.bsky.social and myself are back at @imagecomics.com and doing our goth jumanji thing to its fullest effect.

Out November 12th.

Lots more info over at Rascal: www.rascal.news/exclusive-di...

There is a quest, but I mostly played it as a fantasy sim. You make a weird fantasy dude, you make up a story for them, and you just go around hunting deer, picking flowers or exploring ruins, or mining and smithing, or building a house on a hill for your hot husband.

More like no-tutchpad am I right

Adding some older color prints and proofs to my shop TODAY, 12pm CDT!

Same, I'd love to run it.

D&D 5e, TEETH, Ironsworn Starforged and probably Agon, although that could get pushed to September. And I'm playtesting a couple of my own WIPs, and a new version of Ex Novo, if I find the time.

Whoa, the special edition cover looks great

Mine are themed too, theme is "you live very close to IKEA"

I remember buying the Amstrad was a huge hassle in the first place. It cost like two monthly salaries and my dad had to drive to Warsaw airport to pick it up from customs. They asked him a hundred questions about why he bought it, like he was going to do some spy shit.

Yup, did that with my brother on our Amstrad CPC6128. You couldn't exactly go buy a game in 1990 in Poland.

Name checks out.

How can you play DE for more than 30 minutes and not notice anything meaningful "emerging from the intersection of game mechanics and player choices"? The moment you're interacting with dialogue options and skill checks, you have so much interesting shit taking shape.

The light and changing colors on the fabric of the suit... ❤️❤️

Yup, you can also represent your country at the Olympics in weightlifting if you bring a forklift, enter a cooking show with some Chinese you ordered on DoorDash, and win America's Got Talent by putting a speaker on the stage and playing a Taylor Swift song off Spotify.

Ian, you're not on a hill. You're in a hole and you keep digging down.

Screenahot of a skeet by ian @union.io by the way, hypothetically, imagine a tool for people who've been told by gatekeepers that they are too stupid to be creative. a tool that actually helps them be creative. that would be one of the best things ever invented. I will die on that hill.

If I had a penny for every guy called Ian who went semi-viral over an absolutely dogshit opinion on Bsky this week I'd have two pennies. Which isn't much but it's weird it happened twice.

That's something AI bros seem unable to understand - they think the whole point of art is the final polished product. They don't want to create art, they want to own art they can claim they have created.

The level of skill is not relevant here. A short fan fiction story or an imperfect drawing by an amateur done just for fun IS art.

The art is not in the idea, it's in the execution. Ideas by themselves are worthless. You can spit out ten of them in a minute. You can make a masterpiece starting from a mediocre, generic idea. You can turn a potentially great idea into a piece of trash. What you DO with an idea is the whole point.

Or just talk to another person, who - unlike chatGPT - possesses an actual brain to brainstorm with. I'm 100% sure you'll get more out of it than out of Lying Autocorrect Machine going "so what if there's this ordinary young man, and he goes on a JOURNEY, and - get this - he becomes a HERO!"