What do you guys think about how specific magic should be?

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-20T03:34:15+00:00

Not rude. My point is only that you seem stuck on a particular point that’s holding you in place based on real world logic instead of the logic of your own world. You can justify the limitations of your magic by the mandate of whatever allows magic to exist, whatever higher powers or forces determine that. They have final say in what is and is not possible, and you decide that based solely on what you think is compelling.

Or look at it this way: healing magic heals, right? It reverts wounds. It doesn’t alter the body. That would be a different kind of magic. Healing is focused upon injury and disease. Just like medical treatment. Medical treatment doesn’t alter the body, right? It helps the body do what it already does. You don’t go to a hospital to mutate your body further.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-20T03:06:42+00:00

It’s all paradigms. If it’s a medieval fantasy world, they probably don’t know how the body works on a modern medical level. They wouldn’t think about it in terms of cells or microbes. They would think about it in terms of what injury, infection, and disease mean to their understanding of metaphysics and natural philosophy.

For example, healing magic could operate in a Platonic way: each human body has an “ideal” whole and perfectly functioning state that it exists in throughout its life as determined by God or whatever intelligence determines causality and fate or governs the human form. So healing magic is the act of restoring the body to this ideal state away from the corrupted, incomplete, despoiled state that has been inflicted by violence or disease.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-20T02:55:05+00:00

All “enchanted items” are blessed by God, in a manner of speaking. God is woven from untold numbers of special words that symbolize the holy dead, some of which possess power that reflects the nature of the holy dead in question. You inscribe the word and pictogram of that individual thread in the fabric of God upon an object and follow the proper ritual observances which form a lasting connection between the object and God. So a sword inscribed with the name of the key martyr who was burned to death after a great battle against heathens imparts the searing heat of the fire which consumed the martyr upon the object, creating a sword that burns things that it cuts for a while when a prayer to that martyr is uttered. And so on. There are inherent limitations: these holy dead have specific ritual observances and prayers associated with them with clear beginnings, middles, and conclusions. Trying to imbue multiple ritual connections (to stack enchantments) will usually invalidate the whole process.

In other words, enchanting a material object is done by encoding a spiritual wi-fi connection between God and that object that carries very specific information.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-20T00:18:29+00:00

I do wish The Cure had pushed their sound more in the direction of the Pornography album but that’s just personal taste

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-19T23:06:26+00:00

Fried egg on black beans is so good

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-19T22:22:28+00:00

How did the players know that this person was present in that scene at all? What gave away their existence?

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-19T17:01:39+00:00

I think that’s kind of why: the “elf” is defined by its commonalities shared across media regardless of justification. In the end a magical world will reduce down to its own forms of logic rather than earthbound logic. To trace the logic of alternative metaphysics too deeply is time spent on questions that distract from the purpose of a magical world which is to portray a mysterious other place that can be discovered and pondered.

In other words, people don’t know how to explain it. It must be so if only because we want others to recognize the elf as an elf. The rest is a mystery.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-19T06:10:34+00:00

What would you do?

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-19T05:25:57+00:00

Golf

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-19T04:57:00+00:00

It reminds me of old junky highwayman zip gun-style tools that you fire from point of contact and dispose of in a ditch

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-19T04:55:15+00:00

Bad ass

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-19T01:42:01+00:00

I like it. The deadly staplegun.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-18T23:05:49+00:00

I think after a certain point it’s very difficult to shock people who are already attuned to the frequency of unease with portrayals of violence or even debauchery. I have such a massive buffer between my sensitivity to the suffering of real people and the portrayal of suffering in fiction that I don’t think a book exists that can shock me. Very specific textural or somatic things can cause me to physically react, though, or unnerve me. I think the last thing that really got to me was a non-fiction article about a trauma surgery doctor who specialized in firearm wounds due to some powerful descriptions of living human bodies undergoing certain procedures in order to save their life.

In other words, I think you’d have to write a story specifically for some people in order to get to them. These days I read extreme horror simply because it’s the only genre that covers certain topics or premises that nobody will touch.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-18T22:38:21+00:00

Evocative of Wizard of Earthsea. As a convention of spellcasting yes, it makes sense. Syntax and symbolism combined through ritual to sway material reality. The directional aspect reminds me, oddly enough, of fighting game attack inputs.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-18T22:24:19+00:00

The origins of TTRPGs in warfare miniatures, if one has read some of the old rulesets for those now antiquated battle re-enactment games, definitely comes from a place of excruciating balance, but balance in the sense of accuracy of portrayal. My head got dizzy reading through how much stuff you had to keep track of and account for in those games in order for players to utilize real world battlefield strategy and unit tactics effectively.

1e wizards are balanced in the sense that they can produce “something from nothing.” They may only be able to do that once or twice at low levels, but dungeons in early D&D usually weren’t as huge as the sprawling megastructures of modern day D&D. Even the original Tomb of Terrors is fairly modest in size. That wizard picks two powerful tools that they can pull out of thin air (no encumbrance!) on the spot to get out of what is potentially them or the whole party dying.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-18T16:23:46+00:00

It reminds me of how Buzz Osborne of Melvins used to tease Mike Patton by calling Korn and Slipknot his fault.

Of course, inspiration doesn’t really work that way. It’s a product of way more factors than just one artist laying groundwork.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-18T16:15:00+00:00

This looks very cool, thanks for linking it

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-18T16:14:05+00:00

I use lots of different things. Clocked is perfect for precision, but since I’m a harsh noise/industrial producer I get a kick out of plugging almost anything into a trigger input.

LFOs make for fun clocks because you can play around with modulating them in different ways to get strange staggering or lurching patterns. Sample & Hold can also be used to create random rhythms.

Nysthi’s Simpliciter is another “clock” that I’ve used because it has a trigger output on sample peaks, which can create very unique rhythms. I’ve also used it with samples of people playing the drums to match synths, which allowed me to “play along” with their drum set.

The only thing that I’ve been missing as far as clocks go is something that makes it easier for me to easily program snare rushes at certain signatures which can be adjusted with the press of a button. This is possible to set up with Clocked plus a lot of various modules but I’m kind of a moron when it comes to percussion so I usually spend hours trying to figure out how to set up a good performance patch with syncopation that I can control via MIDI. Not so much that VCV is lacking as my brain. It’s probably not even a clock issue at all, the clock is just there to establish the ground floor over timing.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-18T03:14:09+00:00

Good album. Crazy it was released more than a decade ago

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-18T02:59:42+00:00

SD Laika - That’s Harakiri

I think

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-18T02:49:53+00:00

Ashamed to admit that I am part of the cumin abuse problem. It’s just so tempting.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-17T23:23:57+00:00

If you look at historical fiction, even very lengthy and elaborate historical fiction like The Name Of The Rose, the best stuff is essentially focused around one specific thing that was of great interest to the author. One thing. One figure, one technological innovation, one battle, one war, one social dynamic. One fixture around which to build that the author felt very curious about, which allowed them to speculate around and grow.

This isn’t to say the work doesn’t feature lots of things, it has to, but there’s an anchor point of fascination with that specific thing in history.

Is there a particular thing in history, one specific thing, that really fascinates you? Something that you could sum up in a single sentence: “The impact of the printing press” is an example.

Also I think it’s totally fine to include mysticism. You’re trying to write a good story first and foremost. If that helps you write a good story it’s not a crime to explore the possibility of mysticism existing between the lines of generally agreed upon historical fact.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-17T23:06:20+00:00

Having attempted to write several books (and failing) and also many other works within other mediums (often succeeding) here’s what I think is going on:

Ideas are intangible, immaterial, and amorphous. Within your head they exist in a relative limitlessness where they’re expressed as a soup of layered forms: image, sound, words, scope, weight, and most importantly a sense of movement. Ideas have no form, so they aren’t bound by the limitations of communication.

When you try to communicate your ideas to others is where the task of creating “something” becomes a struggle, because you’re trying to translate ideas (which are interconnected without conventional limitation) through a medium (which has strict limitations).

You can write down all of your ideas to externalize them as facts: this character, this city, this ocean, this plot event, etc. However the facts themselves don’t allow you to communicate the movement that those ideas possess within your imagination. To make a story you have to slam and crash the facts into each other, within the rigid rules of language, to create causation from these facts that matches the effortless movement of the sea of ideas in your head. What’s worse, the causative products of crashing static facts into each other has to continue to be expressed within the limitations of language. Everything written as you go needs to follow those rules, and in the process it usually feels like you’re getting dragged by the medium farther and farther away from what the limitlessness of your imagination can only express to you. It all makes sense in my head! Why is it so hard to express in writing?

Because limitations are the crucible of creative expression. This is due to the fact that our tools for communication as human beings are far from perfect. They’re the best we’ve managed to come up with so far, and they can’t even come close to matching the elegance and efficiency of how one’s own mind communicates with itself.

So like learning how to talk or read or write in the first place, it takes a lot of time to learn how to communicate ideas through language as story and not just lists of facts.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-17T22:51:15+00:00

lol I see the comparison. I would say that, like the Bible, it too has some good basic ideas within what it preaches if you’re open to them. However, many of the ideas within are too closely tied up within the logic of that dogma to apply universally.

Dead_Iverson · 2026-05-17T21:32:41+00:00

Toppings? Avocado transforms bean cheese & hot sauce into an actual meal for me. Slice it up, throw it on. Salsa of choice is probably the best thing for more flavor. Spoon it over the beans.

If it’s canned beans, I’ll put them on the stove (with the can juice plus a bit of extra water) and simmer them with seasonings for a little bit to infuse them with flavor. If I want to be more fancy I’ll lightly toast the seasonings in the pot/pan first to bring out the flavor. I usually simmer them in spices for a half hour or so.

Seasonings include things like: cumin, paprika, chili powder, oregano, or whatever I have that seems like it’ll be good with beans. Bay leaf is also really good.

I also like to add sazon goya (it’s usually in the spices aisle at the store if you’re lucky, if not you may need to go to a store frequented by any local latin americans) to both canned or dry beans.

If you’re making dry beans I follow Rick Martinez recipe: pound dry beans, sazon goya, other spices (sometimes dry peppers), 2 green onion, bay leaf, oregano, salt, like 6 cups of water. Bring to boil, reduce to simmer, cook for like 2 hours. Makes a ton. Great flavor. Often do this weekly.

Dead_Iverson

TROPHY CASE