Gorky Toboggan, CPA

There are 5 different Bluetooth speakers playing 5 different things on all sides of me. The people who do conventions every weekend are maybe not human?

“Did you forget all the important stuff you needed” yeah I forgot all the important stuff I needed. YEAH

hour 6 of a 36hr tattoo convention and I can already feel myself doing the harry dubois smile oh noooo

but if i'm not allowed to feed artists into my artist killing machine it's going to be basically impossible for the machine to keep killing artists. is that what you want?? and before you answer keep in mind this is a very expensive machine

an artwork of Spindle's characters, Asimov and Ottilie, showing a down-POV with Asi sitting crosslegged (at the bottom) and Otti in front of her. A cup of tea is between Asi's legs, with the reflection of them kissing.

Tea Time 🍵

checking my docs to see if this thing I’m writing somehow updated itself overnight (it did not)

Trump confirms his plan to send incarcerated U.S. citizens to El Salvador. Can you hear me now?

www.threads.net/@aaron.rupar...

task complete - sing karaoke

for me, a person too cheap to pay for psonline, they could not have invented a better mechanic than spirit ashes. What If You Could Summon A More Competent Player. And It Was Literally You, But Actually Good At Timing Your Ashes of War. dog bless <3

(twirling hair around my finger) do you think my mimic tear is single

anyway in conclusion - to write compelling stories with hypercompetence, you have to balance it out somehow, either with a matching absurd world (john wick) or by giving your competent hero, incredible weakness in other ways (Barry HBO). do not tell me this guy is a master industrial designer. jfc

i'd also love to hear about the props procurer for the saw traps lmao. "we need 45k used syringes for uhhhh no particular reason" "on it boss" like who is THAT guy. what's HER story. amanda young is managing a Pizza Hut to pay for electricity for the murder warehouse. it writes itself

they have a general contractor on hand for the more difficult builds, and he's the worst person on earth, rapist or whatever, and they keep being like "heyyyy can you pls test this machine real quick" to kill him, and he JUST KEEPS LIVING because building simple machines is hard!

this is p similar to my dream Saw reboot, which is a weekly hourlong TV show about kramer & the apprentices just fuckin' building and testing the saw traps lmao. it is SOOOO SO SO HARD to build simple machines, dude, it is SO difficult, you got endless potential for comedy & drama & gore right there

tonally i think it'd be very heightened and absurd, nathan fielder, Barry HBO. "guy whose only motivation is murder but he will happily spend 2 years judging dog shows about it" uhh rules? i love that guy. what's that guy's deal

he cannot fit into the world. he can only access humanity through stolen, false lives, through the lens of murder. he could have a life anywhere: he could keep the lie going. but he would never do that, because he's The Best, because it was almost perfect, because the next one WILL be, god damn it

he never quite gets there! he never quite deploys the knowledge correctly. & he spent so long fitting into the target's world, at the end of every episode he has to drop everything & shatter his relationships & just fuckin' move on, tough luck buddy

beginning of every episode, we meet the target, & hero establishes the mad-specific way he will kill them. he spends the WHOLE episode gaining skills & fitting into the target's world. endless training grind, endless waiting. at the end, the target dies, but it's never quite the way he wanted --

HBO miniseries. maybe 6 or 8 beautiful, 90min episodes. our hero is an assassin whose whole thing is going deep cover, and motherfucker, he goes DEEP. gets hired at the target's company, works there 18 months. dates the target's sibling for 3 years.

SO ANYWAY, i keep spinning on "how would I write a hypercompetent ubermensch action feature that doesn't suck" and man, frankly, i'm nailing it

what specifically made me so angry was the industrial machining stuff lmao. at least in your John Wicks, they have the decency to not get specific. "yeah he's good at everything, idk, whatever" like great! good! that series also has tarot-based dueling, who gives a shit

oh AND he's an art collector & professional rich guy & very handsome and whatever. "guy who's really good at stuff" is normal storytelling kit, but man, they could not have shattered the suspension of disbelief any harder, or in a more joyless way. the character is ridiculous but the universe is not

re Jackal- this character, this Hypercompetent Ubermensch, is not only a master of martial arts & marksmanship, but also of movie-grade prosthetic disguises, acting, AND industrial design, machining, & global production. also languages, he speaks every language. he's in his mid-30s 🫠

first episode of Day of the Jackal made me so writer-furious i had to pace around the apartment for a full thirty minutes, which has set me on a course of rumination re how i'd fix the Hypercompetent Ubermensch Action Man trope

fucking blaidd like "hey, come meet me in the well :)" do you know how big this map is!!!! do you know how many wells there are!!!! WHERE IN THE WELL BLAIDD! THERE'S A WHOLE OTHER MAP IN THE WELL BLAIDD

idk how anybody played elden ring on opening weekend. the wisdom of the community wiki is not a nice bonus but a fucking necessity haha

this was the breaking point haha. i ran a workshop on freelancing for high schoolers (shoutout my real-guy job) & broke down this cooper's hawk piece & looked at what i just wrote and went what the FUUUUUUUCK

first time quoting a client at the new price rate and i nearly threw uppppp lmaoooooo CHARGING PEOPLE IS SO HARD

brave soldiers ready to fight!!!
#art #ttrpg

tattooing is a marathon not a sprint, the clients will come, it just takes time. i was just starting to get a reliable client base in my old shop, and i'd been tattooing there for a year. it'll take at least that long at the new place. i'm not sorry i left (god no. lmao) but yknow. Scary haha