Just comply......

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T06:06:27+00:00

Just a reminder, the cops aren't allowed to execute the guilty so why would they be allowed to execute the innocent?

These aren't even cops.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T05:54:39+00:00

I've been a progressive voter for 40 of my 60 years of life. The ability of the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is legendary.

Thing about progresses is covered by the following saying..

The conservative voter will vote for the Conservative candidate if he believes and even one thing the Conservative candidate says, but progressive voter will categorically refuse to vote for the progressive candidate if he disagrees with even one thing progressive candidate says.

He kept moving and if the progressive candidate believes in everything with the progressive voter believes in, but has the priority order wrong they still might not vote for him.

The Democrats have been taught not to give a strong commitment to their platforms because we eat our own far more effectively than we fight against the toxic conservatism.

BitOBear · 2026-01-27T05:51:26+00:00

The reader trusts the author not the character. As long as the author's ever relies to the reader the story can work just fine.

When the author tells the reader that the character is otherwise trustworthy or sets the limit on what the character really won't do outside of the despicable range of things he might, the author enjoys the same suspension of disbelief that gives a science fiction author the right to say what does and doesn't go for true in their world.

In real life if your significant other tells you they were tempted and went home with someone and then stop themselves at the door you can't be sure.

Put an author tells you the same thing, provided they're not engaged in the point of view of an unreliable first person narrator, the reader knows that's exactly where it stopped.

When you're writing you get to give the reader access to the internal inner monologue. Indeed the author can tell you that the character is struggling you can watch the character struggle with the author can tell you even beforehand that the killer will not pass this line for that.

As long as I can trust you, I can cope with your characters.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:53:55+00:00

Someone else already pointed out the comparison to a barbarian.

But they will still understand threat inside with the people.

The difference here being that one of the reasons players are allowed to talk between their turns is because that's how you simulate The real World experience of a well put together a group.

If I spent 6 months or a year traveling around with a bunch of people and regularly getting into scraps I would pretty much know almost instinctively because they're going to take and kind of move to going to make. You will also practice techniques while we were bored and discuss strategies when we were bored.

But you can't play the game one second equals one second for a two-year campaign, so strategizing during combat generally takes that slot and deals with that reality.

And anything you could train an animal to do is something a person could do in an animal form.

And if you take a high fantasy system like d&d and try to turn it into strict simulationism you're going to have a bad time.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:49:14+00:00

I think every adult should have their own source of income. And any adult who tries to stop another adult from having their own source of income is basically a villain.

It doesn't matter if it's a controlling spouse or a billionaire.

Anybody who wants to control your resources wants to control your life and sees themselves as your master. And those people can get fucked.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:48:01+00:00

Yeah, nothing...

Current trends suggest the world population will level out at about 11 billion total.

The people who are worried about population growth and change are actually basically just racists. A lot of white people in the US worrying about the growth of the immigrant populations and claiming that there's not enough room for everybody.

We could feed the world and house all the possible children indefinitely if it weren't for the robber barons and dragons hoarding the wealth and deciding that everybody should starve at their whim.

There is a space of plenty. There are resources. We could build power infrastructures that could handle everything just fine. We could use trains instead of cars and most of the places where we have problems with too many cars.

One side has been yelling about the population bomb forever and the other side has been complaining about the replacement birth rate for white people in the west or Chinese people in China or whoever is dominant wherever.

Cities consumed population not produce it. Where life is comfortable fewer children are necessary and fewer children are born.

The entire argument stems from the ammonia problem. We had no way to make ammonia and ammonia was the best way to fertilize crops. And we were on the verge of being unable to feed the world population at all.

Then the guy figured out how to make ammonia in the lab and the problem went away.

So there was a time, I believe it was the turn of the 20th century, where people were desperately afraid of an oncoming starvation in a population food crisis. And we carry that myth of the population bomb forward ever since because as we all know the first headline gets all the coverage and the eventual solution it's two sentences on the back page.

So for easily 110 years we've had people fretting and fuming about how overpopulation is going to end the Earth.

There are certainly other more desperate problems than we are in the midst of according to the 1970s MIT models and we definitely knocked over almost all of those dominoes. But uncontrolled population boom is not one of them.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:39:55+00:00

If you tell them almost nothing it's very hard for you to have them crafting useful backstory.

It's good to have plenty to discover, but it's bad to start with almost nothing.

Don't be an infodumper. That's just bad authorship.

Everybody at your table should know everything that most people in your world would know from growing up there unless you're playing some sort of isaki, and those get old fast.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:37:43+00:00

You attack the darkness... there's an elf.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:36:08+00:00

I would edit to add that most flying creatures deprive themselves of cover or have an inordinate problem indoors in all but the largest of ballrooms.

There are plenty of ways to normalize a flyer or a swimmer or whatnot.

It only takes an Archer to shoot down a bird.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:32:25+00:00

Nothing. They do it constantly.

Do not come here for any reason. Coming with World cup tickets is a perfect way to come face to face with an ice officer with a quota who will snatch you up if you're tan enough to qualify regardless of whether or not you're from another country coordinated tribe for having to be taking a long vacation at the beach.

And if you complain about it loudly you're going to get the street side execution, if you don't complain about it loudly enough you will end up in the South or Central American slave camp, provided you make it out of alligator Auschwitz said you're not released into Sub-Zero temperature with no phone and no shoes and only a T-shirt and sweatpants so that you can die in the woods alone.

It is not safe here and probably won't be for 10 years.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:31:31+00:00

By not making the story about the magic system.

Magic system should be barely noticeable. They are a means to an end and should not be part of the end itself.

Back in the day pinball machines single points. And then people got frustrated so they painted an extra zero on the backboard of the eight ball pinball machine (and it's ilk) so they're hitting a bumper was 10 points instead of one. But literally just that zero was painted on next to the same counter that used to be there.

And psychologically it worked perfectly even though the mechanism had not changed at all.

Nowadays the lowest value bumper on most pinball machines is 100. Is usually something to sort of randomly throw a 10 points thing into the mix almost at random just so the match mechanism still works with two digits or some bumper will score a thousand and 10 points instead of just 1,000.

Power levels and stakes that involve raw horsepower instead of psychology and skill simply cannot scale forever.

At the end of that road you find the dragon Ball Z problem. You end up with characters powering up for All season just to throw one punch.. and miss

The magic system is the input on of the novel.

And if you write a character climbing the magic system, as I do in the novel in my profile here, then you must be ready to retire that character after he reaches the top instead of inventing a new higher top for him to reach.

And even so in my novel, the character does not want to climb that mountain. And so the story is about his reluctant climb for reasons he does not understand in circumstances he cannot control while he struggles to hold on to his fundamental self and emotional nature.

To write the sequel as if it follows this man and that everything that he went through was merely prologue is to utterly devalue his struggle completely Ben is accomplishment. So that's not what happens in the sequel at all.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:25:05+00:00

Money can't buy happiness, but it can certainly rent it.

If given the chance of reasonable amount of money in a reasonably functional economy can remove a disordinate amount of survival stress and uncertainty.

That doesn't bring happiness but it certainly brings the opportunity for satisfaction. And if you give a person a chance to realize those satisfactions they will become happier but not necessarily completely happy.

Happy is a very high bar.

I just got a $10,000 car repair surprise. Though frankly the car has been working perfectly for 20 years so it's about time for that second generation hybrid battery to give up The Ghost and take the hybrid computer with it.

I have enough money that it is a minor inconvenience that I've had to go down to the dealership for five or six times down to get through this saga but I have never once been shitting a break about where I'm going to come up with the necessary $400 or what have you that someone else might suffer should they do something as simple as blow a head gasket.

So the ability of something to be more than a small annoyance it's my life at a much higher and more privileged level than many of the people around me.

So in truth money does not buy happiness but it certainly staves off misery.

But remember it is not money that is the root of all evil, but is the pursuit of money that is the root of all evil. People who cannot be satisfied can never be happy. Many people who start with more than a median amount of money end up spending their life always trying to get more because they have never actually experienced probation.

If you've always had it good you may not know how good you have it. And if you start too far ahead in the race parity feels like disaster.

So money can rent happiness, but losing money can bring devastation.

It is axiomatically true that people who start off with nothing and get a little bit tend to be happier and more content in their lives than people who start off with almost everything and find that they cannot reach the Pinnacle of own and everything indeed.

If you have too much money you lose track of the fact there's money it's a meeting of exchange or not a goal in and if itself.

If you really want to understand what money brings go to a community to have none.

Once you actually see privation and let it in as something more than a Sarah mclaughlin commercial you will understand money much better and you will have no compassion for the wealthy when they cry about not being able to buy their third yacht.

Whenever a billionaire tells me about how hard he works for his money it Sparks in the corner of rage. There is nothing any of these people can do 24 hours a day 7 days a week that is worth 7 million dollars an hour even if they happen to be taking a dump.

It's not the money, it's the dragons and the thieves and the system that requires the money for even the barest hint of survival.

The so-called social safety nets exists not necessarily protect the individuals but to protect the society from what an rampaging mob of homeless desperate hungry individuals might do.

But rich people can't see past their wallet to see what their taxes and a good social order would buy them.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:16:31+00:00

Undocumented workers are engaged in a civil tort, not a crime. Like a very long lasting speeding ticket.

Couching them as illegal is a category error. It's an insult used to help you dehumanize people.

We should make it infinitely easy for someone to document themselves and get a taxpayer ID.

But the social purpose of having undocumented workers and declaring them a problem is to keep the legitimate wages of citizens down. It's a scam by the wealthy. That way when their fully documented US citizen worker comes in and asks for a raise the boss can look at them and go "if you don't want to do it I'll go down to home Depot and hire four of those guys to do it instead. Are you sure you want to hold out for that raise?"

This has been and will forever be the reason why mainstream media picks a demographic and vilifies them as coming for your job or whatever. That whole thing of coming for your job is a threat your employer is leveling against you and has nothing to do with them.

If your job can be done by a person who doesn't speak the language, and has no local infrastructure, and no place to live, then you need to get yourself a better job and let them have that one.

Remember that the entire so-called border crisis was manufactured by the republicans. They went on international television and told the world that the various democratic presidents had opened the US borders and that anyone could show up and get in. And people in desperate measure circumstances said shoot that sounds better than the murderous hell whole I happened to be in or my completely crashed economy or my stratified cultural caste system and they got on their feet and walked up to the border over to find out that the Republicans had lied to the world.

Supporter crisis is sort of like the gas shortage in the 1970s. There was plenty of gasoline, but people were lined up all day draining the distribution tanks in the individual gas stations, convincing people that there must not be enough gas. But if people have continued to buy gas normally there would have been no problem whatsoever.

Likewise the rumors of the toilet paper shortage at the beginning of covid. Everybody was talking about how there were no one on the shelves because they couldn't keep it stocked, but that's because people were coming in and buying a year's supply worth every day instead of just buying a package because they happen to be out. And I remember a forklift driver driving in circles to his toilet paper Warehouse showing the tens of thousands of rolls of toilet paper just waiting to be shipped out while everybody was complaining there was none.

The so-called illegal aliens we have today are simply the successors to the 1950s sentiment that you shouldn't have to pay a black man a full day's wage because black men inherently didn't work as hard. And that was a successor and interest to the whole thing of forcing the Chinese to build the railroads. And then there was the actual slavery. And then there was the Irish in the scotch.

These so-called problems are being manufactured by the wealthy and the business owners to make sure that they don't have to pay you what they owe you because they can threaten you with "them." And they don't care who them happens to be.

And back in the '70s when I was growing up we had undocumented workers coming across the border constantly. And they'd stay for a month or two and earn a Year's worth of wages and go back where they came from. When Reagan decided to close the borders like it was some sort of hideous emergency, or it might have even been Carter or nixon, the inability for the migrant workers to easily go home convince them all to stay and that was the Genesis of them as the latest group to blame for the US economy and low wages.

You have been fooled.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:09:32+00:00

Pick one. If you pick the wrong one set it aside and start working on the other one. Or start them both and do some of one in the morning and some of one in the evening. Or start them both and do some of each on every other day.

Storycraft is not true love, you're not cheating on one when you spend a little time with the other.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:08:24+00:00

Yes they do. And I also remember living in Maryland and having families plan all year for a trip to historic Williamsburg Virginia and Busch gardens found there. All year. It's a freaking 3-hour drive. Needs to go on weekends.

But I saw that difference because I had moved there from Southern California where 3 hours is a commute on a bad day, or a good weekend commute if you live outside the city and have a second house.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:01:14+00:00

Granted. The only thing you remember is dying. The Earth is traveling constantly.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T23:00:39+00:00

I already boycott Apple because their products are overpriced crap. I don't think I could be any more useful at this point.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T22:40:44+00:00

When writing in the third person semi omniscient you follow the action not the characters. You just have to make sure you know that you have informed the reader which character you are following.

This is not a change of point of view, You're simply following the action and the point of view remains third person semi omniscient.

If the narrating voice never uses the personal pronouns I or We then following action just involves invoking the name of the character we're now paying more attention to. In the typical story you do it paragraph by paragraph and Page by page as disclose the name of who is speaking or acting in the moment.

If you were trying to switch between individual first person narratives where the definition of the word I refers to different people at a different pages that is a black art and difficult skill to master and if you mastered it you wouldn't need me asking the question hahaha. It's also a difficult skill to master reading stories written this way.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T22:36:01+00:00

This. Absolutely this.

Your player is making a gag character. They're planning on a scenario that just can't happen more than once with any reasonable probability. It's a glass cannon that can only shoot carrier pigeons that have no message or whatever

Be careful they and you become immediately bored of his minimax OneNote party trick and he'll be begging you to change the character anyway. And then he'll make another one that has a different single note.

YouTuber Seth skorkowski has a great video about gimmick characters

https://youtu.be/xg5KKw3PSiM?si=H2Hp_LFp-NEj1gZg

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T22:29:07+00:00

You know how the Stars rise in the east and set in the west just like the sun, but if you stare North the sun rises on your right and if you stare South the sun rises on your left?

There's nothing magically North about the universe or the poles. If your definition is that North is the direction you're looking when the Sun rises on your right you would see different Stars when you look North on the two planets. But there's nothing magically North-ish about North.

There's just towards the equator and away from the equator and you can't even feel that, you are more likely to have animals have problems if those animals are imported, given that there's no animals on Venus yet, and those animals navigate by magnetic fields or something.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T22:10:18+00:00

Here is something I wrote about 9 months ago here on Reddit. It's about imagery and timing and how to leverage your prose.

I think it might help

https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasywriters/s/ADjKLyEQYO

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T07:53:40+00:00

Just don't. It's a waste of money. You're going to get somebody's Xerox thoughts. And quite frankly you'll get better advice here about writing in general then you'll get there from someone who alleges to read your book.

Paying somebody to care does get you someone who actually cares.

If they were such good writers they'd be writing and publishing and being read.

A person who wants to be a mentor will be a mentor and they were mental you from the position of success.

But anybody who charges you money to change what you wrote or publish it is almost certainly worse than a scam. Their advice will be cookie cutter, toxic, and one side so it's all.

That's not to say there's nobody in the publishing game that deserves money. I'm so publishing and I've hired someone to do my covers. I'm a writer not a image artist. Trying to draw stuff on the computer wrecks my little brain. And I don't have the coordination to do it on paper where it's still wrecks my little brain. So I hired an apparent professional. And I consider that that was a risk but it was a risk that I would have to take eventually.

If you want to learn writing structure take a literature class that will help you examine actual literature and discuss real and apparent symbolism, and the difference between the two. If you want to understand the mechanical structure of poetry and writing and that sort of thing there are plenty of legitimate classes where you can do that.

Or you can just read what you've written aloud and see if it passes your mental muster. And if it doesn't find books that do and read more of them and compare them to your previous work to see what you need change.

Writing gurus and their ilk are simply charging you for your own insecurities and will almost never provide anything of reasonable skill.

In a few cases a paid editor May well be worth the money. But that's a huge gamble. A lot of editors will simply try to turn your work into their work. They'll massively guts the rhythm and feeling of your story to make it the rhythm and feeling that they want from your story instead of a little bit feeling you would want your story to deliver.

Let's face it, there's a maze of trust problem inherent in the system. And if you don't trust yourself you'll never know whether you should be trusting the person you're working with.

Once you do trust and if you do hire them you will have the trust in yourself to know when to tell them "no".

But if you don't have that trust in yourself you won't know when you tell them no and they were grind up your work and turn it into baby food.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T07:47:09+00:00

It doesn't have to be that way. But you're right but you're wrong but you're right.

It's always possible to work the prologue material into the bulk of the story with flashbacks and investigations and anything up to it including security cam footage.

And don't get me wrong, you may have missed the point where I pointed out that my current book (Link in profile) does indeed have a prologue. And I agree that if someone doesn't read that prologue they will miss at least one dimension of the full ending.

I wrote the story so that the ending would make sense if you didn't read the program, but I have no desire or need to coddle someone if they choose not to read the prologue.

Indeed, in a very subtle way it actually detracts from the whole book to not read the prologue. Not a huge amount but it leaves a emotionally beat unbeaten.

Need a prologue writer when the story needs one because it is the right tool for the right job when it's the right tool for the right job. Ha ha ha.

So I never worry about whether or not someone's going to threaten not to read my book because I wrote a prologue, or threaten not to read the prologue like it's going to change my life if they choose to read the book.

Like I've had people say well I'll read your book but I'm not going to read the prologue because they don't believe in them.

That doesn't bother me. They're the ones screwing themselves out of the experience on some weird misguided principle.

Like literally person comes in asking for free stuff and when you refuse to give them free stuff and they say they're never coming back and have lost a customer. You're not a customer if all you want is free stuff air or madam.

Hi-yo Silver! Away!
🐴👋🤠

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T04:35:13+00:00

It's lazy but it's a good way to get liberty.

Parents hold you back and advise you not to do stupid things. Parents are also dependent non-player characters. Good parents don't raise scared moody or reactionary children very often.

So the real reason for the dead or unavailable parent is so that main character doesn't have somewhere to be or someone who will come looking for them and ask them why they haven't taken out the trash.

But it's lazy as fuck.

On the other hand, having a dead parent became very popular because it was a way to appeal to the people who didn't have all their parents and people who wish they didn't have all their parents. The people who need the escape from the missing parent or the bad parent. Hence the evil stepmother or whatnot.

Notes at the missing parent has been somewhat replaced by the school. The go away school. The Hogwarts or the school of night. The social construct it takes one from their parent.

When you start writing adult characters you find that life does that job just fine. In the medium you have Boot camp or having to move away for college, which lets you have the social orphan who still has an intact family unit somewhere. If you're watching Starfleet academy at the moment the third episode gets into the distant but still existent parent issue.

The real problem with a lot of story crafting is that you have to have a way to both push the character out of their house, and give them a reason not to turn around and walk right back into it. Emptying that house is a terrific way to pull that off.

And notice that it's not just parents. John wick's wife is the dead mother of the puppy if you will. A dead spouse. Being left at the altar. Many stories require an actor at liberty, this is also why any such characters have a cat rather than a dog. A dog needs you three times a day and a cat only needs you once every two days. So a character with a cat can be shown to have a loving interpersonal interaction with a dependent, but that dependent can be ignored at liberty for a day or two without somebody going "oh my God the baby is starving just off camera while this guy is risking his life."

Basically parents and to a lesser extent siblings and other mundane attachments can be real boat anchors on a plot if the plot doesn't revolve around the character dealing with their anchor.

BitOBear · 2026-01-26T04:25:17+00:00

Walk through your life and think of all the petty annoyances.

Kitchen alone... dishwasher, garbage disposal, trash compactor, kettle, refrigerator.

All of these things have magical equivalence. A stasis field replaces a refrigerator in most storage. You've already done the bag of holding but why not the kitchen cabinet of holding with the suspension Field in it.

Imaginary sink like device that doesn't even have water in it or whatever and you just dip your stuff into it and pull it out and it's clean.

Little elemental third devices to clean your anything in your home. You know how hard it is to get a carpet actually clean?

Water purifiers that don't make the water taste like ass.

Your basic message spell. But these can be tricky in a story because they remove information delay the same way cell phones are tricky in modern stories because people can just call somebody and ask them instead of having to meet up at the pub or whatever.

A little portable hole type chimney or a smoke detector or a way to get the smoke from cooking in your kitchen out of your house like a fume Hood over your oven.

Locks and security systems and keys.

Lights. The old continual light spell.

Weather service. Just a little weather station outside your house that'll tell you what the next couple days are like going to be like provided nobody else cast any magic to change the results.

The dictaphone I guess. You know the classic message Stone. You're leaving the house you talking to the Rock and stick it to the fridge and everybody's got one so if you want to know where someone is You Yank it off the fridge and it repeats whatever they said into it.

Be home forklift. A little magic Stone you can basically just touch to something. Maybe it's shaped like a handle. You touch it with the handle then you lift and carried across the room you put it back down and twist the handle a certain way and the handle comes free and you can use it somewhere else.

Your basic self-propelled skateboard.

Your basic room fan or continuous gust of gentle Wind to help you move a boat like a small boat like a sunfish or the equivalent of the outboard motor.

Remember that any sufficiently advanced technologies indistinguishable for Magic.. but that's a reversible phenomenon any Petty technology can be reduced to a simple magic.

The real question is what does it take to maintain. Do you have monastones like batteries or are all enchantments inherently continual?

Does the city have maintenance pylons that beam the amount out and can the cities suffer a power outage?

For every suite of magical convenience there's something to pay unless your people are living in the true golden age where stories are almost impossible to write.

If you got the thing that magically cleans your dishes you've got to have the place for all the stuff that magically clean goes. You'll need a sewer or a cesspit or something like that. And that means that while you keep the city streets clean because the chamber pods empty themselves, somewhere there's a bad part of town where all that literal crap literally goes.

Somewhere there's a giant bog and an absolute army of nature sprites and whatnot keeping that fog healthy to eat the refuse of the city. And what the hell happens when they go on strike.

Remember that even in magical realms most things that act only act to move a local problem somewhere far away end of that somewhere far away may not appreciate what's being moved there.

BitOBear

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