A sweaty sausage
Jun. 29th, 2025 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
This year brought us Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors. It’s the third in a trilogy about an angry, selfish girl named Vanja who made it through a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a crop of emotional and physical scars, a talent for picking pockets, the favor of the gods (sometimes), and a healthy hostility for rich people. Against both their better judgment, she falls in love with prefect Emeric Conrad, whom she variously describes as a “human civics primer,” an “accounting ledger made flesh,” and an “intolerable filing cabinet.”
(Here the author of this piece has been compelled to delete a ten thousand–word manifesto about the greatness of the Little Thieves series. If you like the TV show Leverage, or you enjoy digging your teeth into solid character development, or you just hate rich people, you should read it. The first book is Little Thieves. Thank me later.)
"Marching order" is the term used to refer to a standardised arrangement of the characters in a party as they advance down unexplored dungeon corridors. The gaming term comes from the early Dungeons & Dragons rules, but ultimately stems from earlier military use, referring to the equipment, uniforms, and arrangement of soldiers as they march in formation. In fact a lot of the terminology of modern roleplaying games traces its roots back to military jargon, via the filter of Gary Gygax's wargaming background before he wrote the first D&D rules books.
aurilee writes:
Ooo! We might just get a grue! With at least one really big mouth!
Pete's got a pretty good paradigm here. But as Ben points out, all that means is that it's down to a dice roll or who the GM thinks should get attacked or trigger a trap. In which case, why not simply roleplay it? The GM might at least allow the players to test their preparedness fairly in that instance.
Though if we do end up having wild life, escaped experiments, or something else running around, that'd put a damper on my idea of this being a Dark Side pit. There's only been humans that have made appearances in them (the sleen doesn't count as it didn't attack), so a mole rat attack would be extremely unlikely if the Dark Side pit is a concept. Unless they've all got like Kylo Ren or Palpaclone faces. Now wouldn't that be a really weird idea?
"Academia: Staying Afloat" by Timothy Burke from the end of January made me feel warmer. It's about everything. AI slop. Fascism. Modern employment. Greed. The broad gesture at everything. Hope. Determination.
You are the right person to do what you do, know what you know, study what you’re going to study. You do it.
You are a lifeboat.
You are not the passenger being rescued from a shipwreck. You are the rescuer. Your skills, your knowledge, your experience reside in you. You have pulled them from the cold ocean where cruel and careless captains have set them adrift.
You are a lifeboat.
Very pleased at how fast my ankle's been healing; it barely hurts at all except when I flex my toes, and I assume that will get better next week. Ice and rest doing their job as advertised! The knee is — I don't want to say getting worse, that's not true, but as the scab gets thicker and more attached to the skin, it feels more uncomfortable to move my knee through flexion/extension, and that is not fun. Botheration.
I have a dark feeling I should get PT after this; I can feel my gait getting fucked up by having both legs injured in different ways. A new adulting experience, and I already do not like it because it will involve insurance. Maybe I'll call the EAP and make them give me a to-do list or something.
While lying in bed and icing my ankle, I have re-read Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy and Fledgling; I know we've talked about it before, but wow it gets more and more noticeable how she just doesn't think of queerness as related to desire. The stuff she's interested in about gender and sexuality forces her to acknowledge the existence of same-sex sexual interactions, but nothing about them is ever anyone's first choice or pleasurable except in the ways her worldbuilding allows her to impose on the characters.
I am idly fantasizing about a shopping app that lets me:
Note: steps 2-5 do not involve me making decisions or receiving alerts.
Things to Get Me [referral link] is perfect at #1. Google Shopping kind of does #2 but only kind of. The rest of it, I'm fairly sure it doesn't exist and I understand why, I can easily see where this could go very wrong, but I want it for myself and I'm mad that either I gotta build it (no) or outsource to a human. Further botheration.
Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag. You can also support Sidetracks and our other work on Patreon.
Where does one search for secret doors? Everywhere? That'd take too long when you are trying to avoid wandering monsters, find the treasure, and get out alive before your torches run out.
Dead ends are the dead giveaway. Why would there be a dead end, unless it's not really a dead end? They're almost a signal to the players to search for secret doors here.
aurilee writes:
Hah, of course Pete would pull a lightsaber out for light. While there's half-dead flashlights that would provide better light, a lightsaber would also be useful for attack and defence. I guess nobody else has a decent light though as I'd thought Poe's light was the lightsaber for a few moments. Though perhaps that's unfair to the characters; there's plenty of other non-Star Wars movies that have problems with flashlights and lighting as well.
I guess space-time goo causing problems here is as good an explanation as any if the GM goes along with it. It's definitely a lot more interesting than "The Force did this", which is what I bet the movie has as its explanation. But even if that is the official cause, there'd have to be something else that originally made this place. It's not like the Force is a cloud of radiation that randomly builds or destroys things; Force users make it do those things. And then at some point, that kind of explanation is just "a wizard did it" which is so unsatisfying outside of comedy scenes, and it would have been better to not explain things at all.
Anyone else want to hope an unexplained Grue shows up just to keep things weird and interesting?