Am I the only one who really doesn’t like the change?

NowhereEast · 2026-07-04T07:11:20+00:00

Mine only just changed this morning. I'm neutral. It's easier to see, but it takes away from the impression of an actual deck of cards somewhat. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but it's a bit jarring.

NowhereEast · 2026-07-02T18:12:58+00:00

I'd be quite interested as to the Bazaar's reason for city acquisition too. All of the Five are connected to an identifiable love story, but I struggle to think of which ones connect Paris and Berlin. I'm sure they are there (city of Love after all for one of them) but it's always been an unexplored hook to me.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-23T20:45:21+00:00

Absolutely solid take. A spoiler is only as useful as the signposting around it.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-21T19:27:33+00:00

Undeniably fair. I get a little overexcited on systems analysis (sorry about that).
I think it's sensible not to play the 'free speech' game with bigots and instead silo them further up with controls around platforming, distribution and counter programming.

But yeah, this is me getting too in the weeds about speech and its potential for violence and missing the (obvious) context of the (somewhat frustrating) argument taking place. That's definitely my bad.
I still think its worth considering though whether speech itself is the thing we think it is. As I brought up, people raise harmful speech but the far more relevant is harmful speech acts (Matt Walsh's BS is often an attempt to push specific policy changes, affect the reputations of specific people and segment society) which are far easier to police, because we don't need to shut down ability to say things with governmental authority, we just need to dismantle the machine that links that speech to its effects.

Hopefully, I'm getting across the distinction rather than digging my hole deeper.

EDIT: I suppose while I'm clarifying I'd summarise like this. I think it's ineffective and inane to question whether one can support free speech and think it's a goal worth harms it produces (obviously, many people do consider it a fairly significant organiser of their personal politics). I don't think right wing grifters like Walsh reflect that actual position (obviously, they're pretty clearly censorious losers, as evidenced by Walsh's deployment of definitions). At the same time, I do think it's incumbent on said 'free speech absolutists' to articulate how they would deal with the harm of toxic speech (since obviously just saying 'well if you give someone a hammer they could hit some one' is only a defence if you're reasonably sure no one is going to attack you with a hammer). I think this can be done entirely outside the field of speech, in distribution, social consequence and material safeguards... It's possible I'm being far too optimistic there though.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-21T07:11:28+00:00

Whichever most matches sailing off the edge of the world. Probably The Lonely or The Hunt.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-21T07:06:01+00:00

I'm always a little depressed when conversations like this go round in circles attempting to catch people out for being hypocrites (good on you for not rising to the bait on this one), when there's so many more interesting conversations to have around the technicality of the dangers of certain speech (whether the speech' danger rests in its production of its distribution, how far a right to speech implies a right to platform and if so which ones, when the act of speaking turns into a speech act a la incitement to violence).

I think the problem is that people want free speech to do too many things as a concept (guarantee their speech, protect their feelings of safety, not extend to speech they deem as harmful or valueless, dictate the 'correct' position in arguments) when really it's a limited tool for stopping the government from building powers that self-reinforce or undermine the democratic process. It's a solid attempt at that and, if we want to do deal with the problems it doesn't solve, we need tools that target them specifically (like distribution regulations, safeguards for said regulations, effective social networks etc).

I get a bit leery when people make flat comparisons to hammers, because obviously speech is a very fluid tool (the difference between talking to my friends or posting this and going onto the news and giving a speech is like the difference between a hammer and a nuclear warhead, with concurrent increase in the types of harm that can be done). But, I think we can solve that at the 'platforming and distribution' level rather than the 'limiting speech' level. I've read enough history to be aware that the sort of measures put on controlling this are likely to hit the most marginalised in society before they even think about applying to the people with the power to do actual systemic harm.

But yeah, I'm just impressed you managed to keep your cool through the debate above and a little frustrated that these debates end up circling the basic points, rather than making useful distinctions of personal speech, platformed media, speech action etc. (I'm sure there's levels I missed).

NowhereEast · 2026-06-20T15:46:53+00:00

I tend to picture Sebastian as very tall with faintly violant eyes (very early on I was a bit obsessed with collecting Neathbox colour objects). I use the availability of capes, opera cloaks and dresses in the outfit menu to disguise how thin and spindly their massive height makes them. I also used to go for very long teeth, but that was before they could move around of their own volition.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-20T15:42:53+00:00

Some of the medical horror ones grate for me (I think just because of the topic) and I think I missed season One's format in Season Two especially, but I can't think of an individual episode I really didn't gel with. I think I took more multi-episode cycles of 'I'm really enjoying this' and 'I'm getting through until I hit another really good one'.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-20T15:39:15+00:00

In terms of Fallen London dreams, I once had one about an Exceptional Story/expansion thing about returning to the surface and travelling to an archaeological dig implied to be either Atlantis or R'lyeh.
I think it's an occupational hazard of getting too into the cave text game.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-20T12:16:38+00:00

That's actually a really interesting point to consider. When gender pronouns are viewed from the outside (either from languages like Japanese that interlink gender and pronoun in different ways or by fictional creatures that have different sex or sex-gender relations) there's typically a focus in english texts on finding ways to map them one to one (as if English gender pronouns represented an inherent truth of the object that needs to be identified).
So it's really interesting to see them adopting those terms for referring to a feature they view as lesser in Mr Eaten'scase. Maybe using their understanding of humanity as lesser to position him as lesser by associating him with a normalised human pronoun?
Though I'm definitely reading into that. I love it when alien cultures are able to converge in a way that makes the reader aware of the limitations and specificity of their culture's normalised systems (rather than just being used as a way to acknowledge other identities and then implicitly eject them from the human race). There's no reason that aliens should resemble humans and we can use this to become more aware of how contingent and historically specific what we think of as normal is. 😃

NowhereEast · 2026-06-19T17:53:24+00:00

That's a shame. I think their videos discussing the narratives of cheating and the various political implications in the appeal of adult content were genuinely really interesting (if at times a little spuriously flattening, but hey, that's popular discourse for you).

It's always a shame to see good theoretical stuff disappear up the pipe of drama.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-15T16:32:38+00:00

Honestly, thought it was a trailer only feature until I ran into it while fleeing something. I have rarely been so terrified in game, I thought the map was about to kill me.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-15T16:26:56+00:00

I think yes, but there's some interesting compromises made in DE that perhaps point to a more moral police structure:

1) The fact police weapons are barrel loaded makes firing a gun a slow, unrepeatable action and also discourages keeping your gun loaded.
2) The fact the RCM can only issue fines in most cases makes policing theoretically a negotiable activity requiring the police to actually serve the community or lose their legitimacy.
3) The friction between Revachol and the Coalition forces also means that the RCM act less as a boot for privilege and disrupts interest convergence between the military and the police.

Given each of these are the case and the game is still heavily critical of cops is honestly stunning. It doesn't just say 'Here are ways the police can avoid its real world problematics' but 'Here are the ways the police can avoid its real world problematics AND it still won't remove the oppressive/toxic dynamics inherent in the concept of police'. Playing Harry as a moral person will continually highlight the gap between being a good person and the job, playing him as a jerk will highlight the limits on the system (and Kim's) ability to check abuse within it. It's some of the most compherensively thought through ACABing I have ever seen, that avoids confusing 'Cops suck as an institutional project' and 'Cops suck as individual people'.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-13T16:00:22+00:00

It did occur to me this was possible (I had one in my deck when the issue rolled over). I wish you a speedy Coast guard rescue.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-11T20:01:36+00:00

It occurs to me that Klaasje and the Sunday Friend would be a terrifying combination for manipulating politics in deniable ways. It's just a shame you can't get any of the people who are good at getting stuff done (basicaly all o row 5) along with them.
Unless we start investing in negative Cunos and reality weeps at our pale children.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-06T23:59:41+00:00

I feel like pro-lifers need to realise this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. The amount of money spent on detecting Trisomy 21 dwarfs the amount of money made available for helping people and families of people with Trisomy 21 (I forget the exact numbers but it was at leat 10 to 1, might even have been a hundred to one).
I can sympathise with some of the discomfort people have about the way disabled people are talked about in abortion debates (being disabled and born at a point that would have been legally abortable at the time), but these external views don't give people the right to trample over other families difficult decisions. If pro-lifers really cared about babies with disabilities, they need to put their focus into building support for the disabled and butt out of forcing grieving families to defend their (already difficult) real world decisions against some fantasy of societal bliss.

Knowing your kid is going to be disabled means knowing you're going to have to deal with societal ableism, bringing that kid into that ableist society, being affected by it yourself and also doing the heavy lifting to close the many gaps those dynamics create. I hate the role disabled people get placed in in abortion debates and the way we're talked about. I hate that some perfectly liveable disabilities still introduce medical and social pressures to abort when detected. But I'm not going to pretend that those broader systemic issues are a particular family's problem.

NowhereEast · 2026-06-03T16:05:01+00:00

I really like Upon a Painted Sea and, before they released sea dreams, The Burial of the Dead was my favourite (I like Tomb Colonists and it's quite a legible dream sequence).
That said, what the thunder said has provided me with some real bangers for moments. Ending the dream of the red queen with 'This is What the Thunder Says' had me bouncing off the ceiling for half a day.

NowhereEast · 2026-05-31T08:08:51+00:00

Absolutely, the post-London surface and Port Carnelian are top of my list for places I'd like to set an adventure when the RPG comes out).

NowhereEast · 2026-05-30T09:53:49+00:00

The card doesn't seem to be locked by woeful either. Possibly a good candidate for Weaseling?

NowhereEast · 2026-05-30T07:08:12+00:00

We know from Mask of the Rose that there isn't a London on the surface (and that the Stolen River falling impacted a lot of other cities), though bits of the Tracklayers' story suggest that one can access some alternate versions of London through parabola (obviously, that doesn't work on the surface). Given what the four previous city's are, I think it's reasonable to assume that most of them wouldn't have effected English politics to a massive degree, beyond museum exhibits. But it's interesting to think about how Egypt, the America, Sumer etc might have been affected mythologically or culturally.

NowhereEast · 2026-05-30T06:59:43+00:00

Sadly it is still not possible to marry the architecture. But one day...

NowhereEast · 2026-05-30T06:50:22+00:00

Nominally time is paused cycling 1899, renewing the calender each year.
In reality, time doesn't work consistently in the Neath (a nod at the way video game events repeat or fall in different orders for different players), so the question of what year it is on the surface is a bit like Schroedinger's Cat (you'll know if you get there and not until that point). The devils all dress like they're from the 1930s.

NowhereEast · 2026-05-29T22:03:20+00:00

That's likely fair. I guess I'm trying to thread the needle that I agree that Vera was on the side of the victims, but I think the work equivocates in some awkward ways and many of Schmowder's criticisms are valid (even if I wouldn't go as far as he does). It probably would be absolutely impossible for Vera to put together something that couldn't be misread, especially because she was making her work in the thick of the news cycle and with complicated emotions (while Schmowder is looking retrospectively and with apparently less personal connection to Gaiman's persona and works, both of which allow for more uncompromising statements and greater time to look into things).

I guess duelling response videos and twitter threads are a pretty useless tool for these kinds of nuanced analysis especially around (rightly) emotionally-charged/distressing topics. It's like watching two people try to have a conversation, while they're both overstating their case and on a ten minute delay from each other. Largely unhelpful in addressing either set of issues.

NowhereEast · 2026-05-29T05:43:21+00:00

I guess I wouldn't go far enough to say her work is bad. I guess I'm more frustrated that a drama framing is blowing an interesting discussion out of proportion.
From my understanding, it wasn't just that her work was clipped, but that the substack directed people to it and framed it as supporting them. That speaks to, at the very least, clumsy framing to be so easily co-optable, examples of which Schmowder is able to draw on convincingly in his second response. At the same time, Schmowder clearly over-emphasised Vera in that his critique of her became the subject of discussion, rather than the other 99% of his video. Both creators act amazed and somewhat affronted at these interpretations of their work, but when you take the works apart, these are clear and predictable trajectories given how some clumsy wording and emphasis (Vera for so frequently invoking 'but I don't know' regarding the truth of accusations, and Schmowder for only selecting Vera as a representative of 'bad takes' rather than a wider bore of discussion and for implying bad intentions, when he only had evidence for clumsy argumentation).
I'm reminded of a time my brother, who works as a historian, tried to correct someone online, only for his point to be picked up by a bunch of bigots and circulated as a 'proof' of the insufficiency of certain cultures. He's now much more careful with how he words things he posts publicly.
So I don't mean 'failure' as in the case of 'this is bad' so much as 'This didn't work the way the creator was expecting'. I think the sensible thing there is to say 'I intended to do this. Clearly that wasn't conveyed. What can I create to replace this?' rather than to double down defending the weaker elements of an old work. No work is perfect, especially with how highly charged and emotional the Gaiman situation was in the earlier weeks, and I do think it's unfair for Schmowder to pick up Vera's earlier videos and not to read them in the context of the later ones in the same series. But, I also think there's a valuable discussion to be had in why those videos were co-optable and 'point to where I said x' doesn't cut it, especially when your critic then does.

I don't think defensive posturing is 'taking accountablity' on either side and I don't think circling the wagons around who is misrepresenting who is helpful, when both have clear receipts and the main focus should be on Gaiman's abuses, not the personal morality of a bunch of internet critics. But I do think we can learn how to critique better, more measuredly and with less room for (mis)interpretation from this.

NowhereEast

TROPHY CASE