Seth Skorkowsky

If you want to learn about Exposition, Inciting Incidents, & Rising Tension, most geek cons have writing classes and panels with some very talented authors & editors talking before near-empty rooms.
Even GenCon.
They'd love to have you and the cost is already included in the General Admission price.

Freshman year of college I started broadcasting classes. We'd get tested on Pot and Pan dials and what they did and how to identify them on a board.
Got a job at a radio station that summer and learned all that stuff better during my new-guy orientation

$800 a seat and all you learn is just how to run D&D?
That's like paying to attend a fancy driving school that teaches only how to drive a 2016 Toyota Camry.
I've done 3-day writing workshops headed by Hugo and Nebula winners for less.

This was an amazing game. Ross is insanely good at improvisation and he blew it out of the park running us through this improvised space horror.
It was a ton of fun.

Wait. What?

6/6
Radioactive technology is amazing. We use it in medicine and energy. It is wonderous.
But when it was new, and people rushed to have it fix every aspect of their lives despite the danger, people got hurt.
Greed and ignorance of a new technology wielded it recklessly.

Anyway, enough about AI

5/6
We can laugh in horror at all the Radioactive Quackery and ways people tried to use radioactive materiel. We say that "no one knew better," but dangers were known.
Naivety and greed touted these products as "safe" and people bought it.
Customers wanted to believe it was safe.

4/6
Kids could get an Atomic Energy Lab science kit that came with radioactive materiel.
It was later deemed the 2nd most dangerous toy made (behind Lawn Darts).
The product failed, but due to its high price tag and not due to safety concerns of kids not properly following the instructions

3/6
The Atomic Age brought the wonders of nuclear energy. Car companies began designing nuclear-powered cars with mini-reactors that would be able to get 5,000 to 10,000 miles without refueling.
Imagine a world where we cut oil dependency and exhaust pollution back in the 1950s!

2/6
Radiation treatment was used for many ailments.
My dad had radiation treatments for his teenage acne.
It was used to treat ringworm.
It was touted to kill the bacteria on your face and leave you with flawless beautiful skin.
It was called safe. But later cancer rates say otherwise.

Thread 1/6
The first half of the 20th Century introduced us to the wonders of radioactive technology. People rushed to embrace it.
It was the future.
In shoe stores you could x-ray your foot for a "perfect fitting shoe." While dosage levels were mostly minimal to customers, not for store employees.

I'm reluctantly good with this. Schwarzenegger is old enough now.
However, Conan the Barbarian was more than Arnold.
Basil Poledouris passed away and it needs a composer that can carry on that distinct sound.
Mako is gone, and a new chronicler with a good voice is needed.
Don't CGI it to shit.

Something new is brewing for Wednesday on Push the Roll with @rossbryant.bsky.social!

Join us to find out what character’s suffering is delighting @sskorkowsky.bsky.social

featuring! @nouralogical.bsky.social Mary Lou and @cuppycup.bsky.social

I believe I might have gotten all my income/expense records over to my CPA in under 5 hours. This is a personal record. After years of tax nightmare gig-work, I've almost got my shit organized.

Now on to Part 2, where I'm told I need to submit 20 more weird and impossible-to-find things.

For years my dream had been having Indy retire, say he's passing the hat & whip to his son, and as Mutt reaches for them with "Thanks, pop," Dr. Wan Li "Short Round" Jones walks in roundhouse kicks Mutt in the face, says "You call him Dr Jones," and accepts the whip and hat as Indy's successor & son

I humbly present my headcanon

Jason Daniel.

Yesterday I was talking about interviews with small channels/podcasts, and then this pops up.
The Dungeon Plunger is a small channel that deserves more love. He & I had one of my favorite interviews ever (I confess my ADHD was flared to full glory, turning our "short" chat into 2 hours)
Check it out

This is 100% true.
Also, the seasoned one probably has more elaborate recording equipment, which only introduces far more potential points of failure.

Doing an interview for a novice podcaster: Mics not working, webcams breaking, somewhere a leafblower. Embarrassed host apologizing, believing their inexperience is to blame.
Doing an interview with a seasoned professional podcaster: All the exact same technical issues. Host shrugs & curses Crom

Hell yeah!

The Laundry Files did it. They also had Lovecraft be wrong in his description of Cthulhu. He wasn't a blubbery squid dragon man, but more like a tongue-eating louse.
With Ashes of Onyx I had Carcosa and Yellow King be talked about by Bierce, Chambers, and Lovecraft.

Call of Cthulhu campaign about a bunch of lonely people off the internet coming together to search for monsters and finding themselves –just before the swirling vortex of madness consumes them all.

The argument that there's no crossover and it's all-or-none for being only one category is where the whole thing collapses.
It's the same issue when people try to rigidly define and categorize by genres. It's never strictly black and white.

GNS theory - Wikipedia

Gamist Narrative & Simulation. It came out of Ron Edwards and The Forge in the 90s. They say it's now "Obsolete" which is a nice term for "Never correct in the first place but we can't admit we were wrong"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_the...

I, too, dislike GNS Theory for being dumb nonsense while also hating how useful it is to explain things.

Look, you gotta let us release some steam by mocking them every once in a while, otherwise it builds up to making an "It got WORSE!!" video. And none of us want that.

I was busy with Cyberpunk 2020 for 4e's run and never paid attention to it. I know very little about it.

D&D has a weird history of refusing to admit edition changes. 1e AD&D had the Gold Spine era when Unearthed Arcana and the survival guides made it a 1.5.
2e had the weird Combat & Tactics "We promise this isn't a new edition" phase.
3.5 they at least admitted what it was.
This one took time to admit