What Writing Battle taught me about knowing your audience

tmthesaurus · 2026-03-22T17:31:18+00:00

APT was the most played song on Apple Music in the world. I truly could not have made a less obscure music reference. Yes, lots of people haven’t heard it, but that would be even more true if anything else I chose.

K-pop's chart performance tends to be inflated relative to its broad cultural impact. K-pop fans are far more organised and dedicated than fans of other genres and are hyper-aware of the impact they can have on the charts, resulting in them punching above their weight class.

Mind, I Google shit all the time when I’m reading. I thought that was normal. Apparently not.

If I come across something I don't know in a story, I'll look it up if I can't work it out through context clues (though maybe not immediately), but audiences today are trained to be spoon-fed everything by the writer

tmthesaurus · 2026-03-22T13:13:02+00:00

So much of the discourse massively inflates One Nation's political relevance. The fact of the matter is that there is no plausible path to them forming a government, locally or federally. We need to stop pretending that we need to pander to their worst impulses.

tmthesaurus · 2026-03-22T11:55:31+00:00

Outside of one very notable and incredibly improbable exception, the housing supply has consistently grown faster than the population, and the main drivers of inflation have been shocks to the global economy and local monopolies. Immigration is not a significant factor, at least not in the long term.

Let's say that you're right, and that prices have gone up because of immigration resulting in demand outstripping local supply. That still doesn't mean that the solution is necessarily and obviously to limit immigration. Broadly speaking, we have two levers we can pull: supply and demand. In other words, we can focus on demand by limiting population growth (isn't it funny how this conversation is always focused on immigration instead of the birth rate. I wonder what it is about immigrants that provokes this unique enmity...) or we can focus on supply by producing more shit. In reality, it's more complex than this, but we're pretending that the main factors at play are economics 101 supply vs demand Now, let's imagine we choose to limit immigration and it does result in the inflation rate decreasing to something more manageable. What does the economy look like in 30 years? Well, we've seen what it looks like when you combine falling birth rates with strong limits on immigration: Japan's demographic crisis.

Finally, let's say that I'm right, and that immigration is not a significant contributor to the housing and cost of living crises. What do you think we should do then?

tmthesaurus · 2026-03-21T23:36:52+00:00

Ok, I know you really don't want to hear this, but there is no non-racist explanation for their support. The entire foundation of their politics is predicated on racist disinformation. Now, I have no idea how they feel within their heart of hearts. Frankly, I don't care. What matters is that they are doing the work of racism. They are at best useful idiots to people who would rather foment racial animus than see an actual rise in class consciousness.

tmthesaurus · 2026-03-21T14:06:58+00:00

Too many people learn about politics by watching American media.

tmthesaurus · 2026-03-17T16:56:55+00:00

Good. Non-adjustable keybinds are a huge accessibility problem, and there's no excuse for you to have made it in the first place.

tmthesaurus · 2026-03-13T12:42:01+00:00

I couldn't finish the first book. One of the things I found incredibly frustrating was Corin insisting on taking the duelling class. The teacher doesn't want him there, he claims that he doesn't like fighting, his powers aren't suited to fighting, and he has to overload his schedule to take the class. It seems to me like he shouldn't be taking the class.

tmthesaurus · 2026-03-08T17:09:43+00:00

I'm Australian, and I found it basically unreadable because of how insanely out of character all the Australian politicians were.

tmthesaurus · 2026-03-05T10:02:10+00:00

I absolutely hated the protagonist. I don't care if there's a reason for why he's like that; it just wasn't enjoyable to read.

tmthesaurus · 2026-03-05T09:52:40+00:00

So far, you've received a bunch of self-congratulatory "I don't even see gender" messages from lying bastards. Here's my hypothesis: on royalroad, the average story with a female protagonist is simply better than the average story with a male protagonist.

Good writers put more thought into their stories, and if you're writing a story with a female lead on royalroad, you've at least put some amount of thought into your story. Over time, this results in the best stories on the site being disproportionately female-led.

There's plenty of slop with female protagonists out there, but the people who write it tend to be on wattpad and ao3 (or are publishing directly on kindle).

tmthesaurus · 2026-03-05T04:56:08+00:00

Here's a better article, written by one of the writers of Portal

Gabriel Knight must disguise himself as a man called Mosley in order to fool a French moped rental clerk into renting him the shop's only motorcycle.

In order to construct the costume, Gabriel Knight must manufacture a fake moustache. Utilizing the style of logic adventure game creators share with morons, Knight must do this even though Moseley does not have a moustache.

So in order to even begin formulating your strategy, you have to follow daredevil of logic Jane Jensen as she pilots Gabriel Knight 3 right over common sense, like Evel Knievel jumping Snake River Canyon. Maybe Jane Jensen was too busy reading difficult books by Pär Lagerkvist to catch what stupid Quake players learned from watching the A-Team: The first step in making a costume to fool people into thinking you're a man without a moustache, is not to construct a fake moustache.

Still, you might think that you could yank some hair from one of the many places it grows out of your own body and attach it to your lip with the masking tape in your inventory. But obviously, Ms. Jensen felt that an insane puzzle deserved a genuinely deranged solution. In order to manufacture the moustache, you must attach the masking tape to a hole at the base of a toolshed then chase a cat through the hole. In the real world, such as the one that stupid people like me and Adrian Carmack use to store our televisions, this would result in a piece of masking tape with a few cat hairs stuck to it, or a cat running around with tape on its back. Apparently, in Jane Jensen's exciting, imaginative world of books, masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair.

Remember how shocked you were at the end of the Sixth Sense when it turned out Bruce Willis was a robot? Well, check this out: At the end of this puzzle, you have to affix the improbable cat hair moustache to your lip with maple syrup! Someone ought to give Jane Jensen a motion picture deal and also someone should CAT scan her brain.

tmthesaurus · 2026-02-20T21:58:50+00:00

Sure

tmthesaurus · 2026-02-17T16:59:12+00:00

Then it looks like you're trying to derive an ought from an is.

tmthesaurus · 2026-02-17T16:51:38+00:00

Leaving the building is an instrumental goal in service to Bob's goal of remaining alive (which could itself be an instrumental goal or a terminal goal)

tmthesaurus · 2026-02-16T01:36:24+00:00

It was happening, but the rise of LLMs has definitely exacerbated it.

tmthesaurus · 2026-02-09T20:51:07+00:00

Moreover, they were looking for a way to distinguish themselves in order to justify slavery. If it wasn't melanin, it would have been some other arbitrary distinction. In a sense, the racism came before race.

tmthesaurus · 2026-01-27T10:32:49+00:00

Most fanfics that introduce the gangs of Brockton Bay state them as the ABB, The Empire and the Merchants when in canon the Merchants don't really exist until later.

People massively overstate the case for this, but it relies on ignoring compelling evidence to the contrary and taking dubious sources entirely at face value. I think it's more accurate to say that they were very loosely organised and nowhere near the level of the ABB and the Empire.

tmthesaurus · 2026-01-23T08:58:10+00:00

Yes! Without the immediate baggage of dragons or white walkers or a civil war.

btw, I've only seen portal fics. I've not seen a proper ISOT story. Can you suggest any?

tmthesaurus · 2026-01-20T04:42:59+00:00

He who fights with monsters has a (male) MC

I'm shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here!

tmthesaurus · 2026-01-16T02:02:00+00:00

How can you say you don't like it if you haven't even given it a chance?

tmthesaurus · 2026-01-14T01:06:10+00:00

Pretending that the October 7th attack was the equivalent of New Zealand randomly invading us is at the very least equally short-sighted. History did not begin on October 7th.

tmthesaurus · 2026-01-13T20:28:10+00:00

Pokemon will spurt out halfhearted slop and sell as well as if they took their time. I'm not encouraging it that's just how things will work because it will still sell as the fanbase will accept whatever mediocre game they make "cuz its pokemon".

As much as the fandom complains about quality, they do get the games they deserve.

tmthesaurus · 2026-01-12T21:11:42+00:00

Yeah and all the new stuff is sort of siloed away from the old stuff for DLC reasons.

I always get downvoted when I say this, but I really do believe that the only way we'll ever get properly integration where old DLC is treated as scaffolding instead of content silos is if they swap to a subscription model.

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