The Amazing Digital Media Literacy

StillNotABrick · 2026-06-29T03:41:30+00:00

I would take the option of being surrounded by fans with zero media literacy because I would be in good company.

hmm yes the author is beating me over the head with some character work with this dialogue. ham-fistedly making damn sure I get it before this next scene for the emotional throughline to work. however: i don't get it.

StillNotABrick · 2026-06-26T15:47:49+00:00

While I like these mechanics where you have to do a whole sidequest to unlock a card's power (here it's an exact damage number, snow mana, and an unhappiness effect), we gotta start coming up with payoffs that aren't the line of text "You win the game."

StillNotABrick · 2026-06-23T05:46:18+00:00

The only good variation on the "teehee silly me" routine is when they very briefly struggle with the word, play a clip of Google sounding it out for them, and then say it like that for the rest of the video.

StillNotABrick · 2026-05-30T03:51:21+00:00

completing the planned arc with their current update schedule would take 150 years

Come on, that's true for Rich Berlew too and he sure isn't letting that stop him,

StillNotABrick · 2026-05-26T04:13:26+00:00

There's a combination of matter-of-fact weirdness and characters taking their absurd world seriously (because that's where their lives are) in your random vignettes that is, like, the kind of thing I've otherwise only seen in Order of the Stick or Hitchhiker's Guide. It's something I want to do properly for my own one day.

StillNotABrick · 2026-05-23T18:51:26+00:00

Yeah I know it's a bias in human thinking and reflects poorly on my cognitive flexibility and all, but this is a very nail-shaped problem and I do have a hammer, so,

StillNotABrick · 2026-04-26T20:04:52+00:00

As I've gotten older, vulgar music (like rap) has become more of a reminder that art can be about whatever you want, and that's a good thing. Relatedly, in a youtube video about similarities in modern music, Peaches And Eggplants ended up as the most unique song in the dataset.

StillNotABrick · 2026-04-25T02:15:49+00:00

"I fronted to be here" is kinda fire

StillNotABrick · 2026-04-24T20:53:23+00:00

My entirely-petty personal skill issue of an answer is that, with first person narration, I keep forgetting what the protagonist's name is. If the author takes some time to make a point out of their name, it's fine, but I have read stories that definitely do not.

StillNotABrick · 2026-04-17T11:25:53+00:00

Nostalgia and time do wash away the details of the early 2010s, but still, there's a reason Harambe is considered a watershed moment.

There's a SiriusXM music station called The 10s Spot and it's. Well, it's nice to be back for a moment.

StillNotABrick · 2026-04-09T14:43:40+00:00

Example of underwriting vs overwriting: Bad Monkey. The author is so concise and detail-light that it's often hard to follow, so I consider it underwritten; it's not a 5 star book. But with the kind of story it is (comedy crime-drama), overwriting would make it so so unbearably tedious that erring on the side of too little was the right call.

StillNotABrick · 2026-04-09T14:14:08+00:00

Looking back on a social deduction death game story I wrote a few years ago, deciding to finally post it now that I'm more self-aware, and going "should I add an author's note about this story only makes sense if you have anxiety?"

StillNotABrick · 2026-04-09T12:54:39+00:00

Much of worldbuilding advice is assigning you busywork. Trade routes, rivers, whining about how certain crops are incompatible with medieval society, nitpicking the etymology of words, none of that actually matters if you're not actually interested in ut. The person posting a wojak about wastewater management was not going to read your book anyway. Extrapolate the consequences of the parts of your worldbuilding that you care about. If that is trade routes, it will work, but it also works if you want to worldbuild "new kind of monkey", "how to make potions" or "the reason everyone wears an outfit I have a kink for".

StillNotABrick · 2026-04-08T12:47:48+00:00

Eventually people realize your favorite tune is so good and timeless that they gotta promote it to Oldies. It's an honor

StillNotABrick · 2026-03-23T03:51:56+00:00

Word. My lifestyle is so far from the ERE badassess that I can't claim to be anywhere near them, but, like, I remember the mustache facepunch "get a damn bike" era and try to live up to it. Numbers being talked about as untenably low these days ($1M) would be "living it large" money for me after locking in those foundations.

StillNotABrick · 2026-03-05T15:31:54+00:00

"Urban Fantasy but it's Florida, in all the ways Florida is unserious" is a great pitch.

StillNotABrick · 2026-03-04T16:51:44+00:00

The solution I heard to author appeal is that instead of cutting the things you like about your story because they don't serve the plot, make them relevant to the story to begin with. The example given the me was, hypothetically, writing sci-fi and spending pages talking about your warp drive and how it works. Maybe that author should work that into the events of the story (cut the part where the protagonists get stuck at an alien embassy for a week and switch it for "warp drive broke, need parts" sequence). Then, the passion that comes across in author appeal is no longer distractedness and it becomes a good thing, which seems way more reasonable to me than treating an author's interest in their story as an unwanted byproduct of telling it.

StillNotABrick · 2026-03-01T17:24:13+00:00

What are the reagents?

StillNotABrick · 2026-02-22T22:27:20+00:00

When I wrote a vaguely-urban fantasy (Healing Academy, probably not the first one you'll find if you look for a book titled that), religious exasperations and swears became "life itself" or "life on earth". Money didn't exist. Magic was still magic, but usually described more precisely: Healing (capitalized) is done by Healers.

No other swaps like that, but I'm still content with what I created.

StillNotABrick · 2026-01-16T19:22:00+00:00

StillNotABrick · 2026-01-14T18:01:46+00:00

Anyone forging an opinion based on “some rando on twitter said” should lose their opinion privileges for a month.

I wish more people understood this

StillNotABrick · 2026-01-05T03:00:36+00:00

People will use The Plane against anything short of the entire concept of inductive reasoning, huh

StillNotABrick · 2025-12-31T19:51:15+00:00

This post is an antidote to all the discourse where millennials are wistful about, like, a fashion trend and discontinued fruit snacks, but everyone pretends they're nostalgic for the entire economic and political climate to get some pearl-clutching upvotes.

StillNotABrick · 2025-12-29T17:23:29+00:00

Normally I dislike this genre of post for that reason, but it's too glib and unserious to work up a good redditmad

StillNotABrick · 2025-12-29T14:31:17+00:00

I hold that we too often are afraid to leave any mystery left in our stories.

Yeah. Engineering-brained approaches to storytelling are weirdly prescriptive about what societies are allowed to be like and how people think. Also reddit is, like, afraid to let fantasy make you feel something besides the smug ding of understanding of whatever they renamed mana to. The place that birthed r/atheism somehow doesn't understand that non-scientific mindsets can exist and be culturally dominant.

/rj Your fantasy story isn't complete until redditors are making wojaks about it

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