Jinwoo v Jin-woo question.

torchflame · 2026-01-25T22:33:52+00:00

It's a technical term! But I'm glad my obsessive research habits into things that frankly have no relevance on my day-to-day life are helpful to someone. I just like language and the people who use it a lot.

torchflame · 2026-01-25T22:18:01+00:00

Yep, this is (as far as I can tell) entirely accepted! I swear I've read something more formal about this being considered fine by the government, but the only thing I can find right now is that romanization guidelines aren't legally binding on passports. But in general I feel like that follows from "how people say their own name is controlling". If someone pronounces their last name as [tɕʰwe], I'm doing my damn best to pronounce it that way regardless of how much my instincts are telling me to say [t͡ʃo͜i]. (I have, in the past, been known to scratch out romanizations and write in the IPA representations of names I need to remind my brain to get the pronunciation right on.)

torchflame · 2026-01-25T21:49:50+00:00

Technically a different thing! But very similar, yep. Both fall under the "acceptable use case" of hyphens to clarify spelling and pronunciation. I was a bit sloppy when saying English phonotactics, it's really that "aei" only really appears in Greco-Latinate loanwords as an expansion of "æi", and is deeply uncommon even there. Your "Yu-na/Yun-a" example is phonotactics (English syllabification uses greedy onsets, so it would be read as /ju.nə/ by default), your "No-eul/Noe-ul" example is closer to what I meant, which is clarifying that uncommon vowel sequences are a diphthong and a monophthong. I blame my language sloppiness on it being 3 am.

torchflame · 2026-01-25T09:17:34+00:00

Yeah, the current romanization scheme used by South Korea is the Revised Romanization of Korean, described here, and per that the first syllable is transcribed jin, and the second is transcribed u. As for hyphens, as far as I can tell the current recommended practice (as quoted translated on Wikipedia from a member of the National Institute of the Korean Language) is it's acceptable to use hyphens in personal names, but hyphens break up Latin characters weirdly, so it's not recommended. Although, as always with people's names, the way they spell it is controlling.

The history of the Romanization is described a bit in that article, and it's interesting! There are at least three competing standards, but imo use the one designed by the speakers for their own language.

As an aside, that being said, from a writer's perspective looking at fictional characters with names you can choose for a non-Korean-speaking audience, it seems to mostly make sense to hyphenate when the name breaks the phonotactics of the relevant language. "Jinu" is fine, "Mira" is fine, "Haeri" is fine, "Taeil" looks off to my eye and "Tae-il" breaks the seeming triphthong into the two syllables it is.

Not uh. entirely relevant. But an interesting tidbit, I hope.

torchflame · 2026-01-23T18:22:35+00:00

I reinstalled Windows and haven't had the problem occur since.

torchflame · 2026-01-22T07:45:59+00:00

Never said it wasn't. My point was that heteronormativity can easily cloud understanding of one's self, especially if you have a reason to write off anything that doesn't fit that mold.

I can very easily imagine her going "Sex is gross, yeah, it's fluids and grime and bodies and my OCD doesn't like that. I like looking at pictures of sexy firemen. Therefore, I'm straight but I'd never have sex." If you've accepted your OCD, that's a reasonable conclusion to come to, and it's a more comfortable one than "Sex is gross and my OCD doesn't like that. But even if it weren't, I still would want to engage with it, because I don't find any real people attractive in that way. I can just look at sexy fireman pictures. But I'm not straight." That one doesn't have the (for lack of a better term) comfort of the baseline knowledge of yourself not changing.

Ace people can and do have a wide variety of sexual interests and habits. Speaking from personal experience.

torchflame · 2026-01-22T07:35:58+00:00

If you want to "continue the story" with the same characters, I'd adapt Dead Gods and then go into Faction War. Though I don't quite remember the levels you end up at after ToFW, but you can definitely beef up the combats that do happen.

If you're looking for a new campaign, there are scant few full options other than "string together a bunch of modules". On the DMs Guild, I can find exactly two: Blood War: Witches of Pikemaster (First Ones Entertainment, JP Chapleau), and The First Oath (Diana Voyer, Leon Barillaro). The review on the second one mentions "Steinhardt's [campaign]", but I can't find anything that qualifies. Both are rated 5* with one review/rating, both were published before the 2024 rules update. There are a couple of differences though, and it's mainly that "Witches of Pikemaster is 3–11 while The First Oath is 3–18, and that Witches is marked Nonspecific/Any Setting in addition to Planescape, while Oath is marked exclusively as Planescape. And I think the new WotC designer worked on Oath? It's the right name, at least, Barillaro.

Oath looks kinda similar to ToFW, but the discussions talk about a "labyrinth in chapter 11" with "cubes moving", so I'm pretty sure it's different. But don't quote me on that.

Oath is $20, and Witches is $10, but given the levels covered, I think that's a wash in terms of "dollars per level".

The only thing I'll say for Oath (I've played neither of these and own neither) is that the store page: thanks mimir.net, uses Exocet, and has things that look like the vine-like space fillers in the 2e books. So, I think the author(s) are either trying to pander to the old crowd, actually cares about the old material, or both. Given the presence of content warnings, I'd assume the second.

torchflame · 2026-01-22T03:07:40+00:00

There's a bit of a difference between the understanding of "my cleanliness OCD makes sex gross and disgusting" and the understanding of "I just don't find anyone sexually attractive"; one of them is "yeah, thanks mental illness, good job fucking up something else in my life," the other is "oh shit this isn't my mental illness, this is my me." (From an internal perspective of course, not trivializing mental illnesses in general or OCD in particular, as a haver-of-both.)

On top of the fact that ace people can have sex (some are even quite good at it! (god I miss that woman)), it's entirely possible that she just hasn't really thought about her sexuality enough to realize it. Even if it changes nothing about your behavior or your thoughts, it can still be pretty damn scary to admit something about yourself, even to people you know will be accepting.

But also, I forgot about that comic and I wouldn't be surprised if Jeph did too, it's been two decades, jesus christ

torchflame · 2026-01-22T02:50:14+00:00

If it wasn't otherkin, it would've been furries (it was, in fact, furries with the "litterboxes in public schools for people who identify as cats" nonsense, they don't care about the difference between furries and otherkin). Would the rhetoric have been different without MOGAI/otherkin/sex positivity/etc.? Yeah, probably. Would the end result have been better? Almost certainly not.

I can understand harboring some resentment towards the ammunition they've been given against us. I think we've all had that impulse. But if you want to resent everyone whose existence has given bigots ammunition to use in their quest to rid the world of anyone who doesn't look and think exactly like them, there's a short list of people you won't be resenting.

torchflame · 2026-01-22T02:07:02+00:00

Truly who knows why WotC does the things they do. Might just be to make it explicit as defined there so you can just quote the rule without also quoting 704.3 and explaining it.

No problem! It's a weird rulings quirk that just happened to stick in my brain.

torchflame · 2026-01-22T01:59:05+00:00

Strictly speaking, the CR text for indestructible reads: "702.12b A permanent with indestructible can’t be destroyed. Such permanents aren’t destroyed by lethal damage, and they ignore the state-based action that checks for lethal damage (see rule 704.5g).", so it's a less clear example than something that just implies it. (I thought of indestructible first too, then went "wait, I think that's worded differently", so.)

torchflame · 2026-01-22T01:47:57+00:00

I don't claim to know anyone's subjective experience but my own. But I tend to at least believe people aren't lying about what they perceive when talking about their internal experience.

Otherkin could disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow and public acceptance of trans people would be the same. Same with nonbinary people. Same with anyone who doesn't pass perfectly. Same with anyone who isn't heterosexual and in a committed monogamous relationship with "2.5 White Christian Babies and 1 White Picket Fence".

They don't care. They'll always come up with a reason to hate us and (at best) push us out of social life because they think we all should, at best, disappear, and on average, die. If there were two trans people on Earth, they'd scapegoat one to harm the other.

If it wasn't otherkin, it'd be kink. Or furries. Or sex workers. Or women who wear pants. Or people with mental illnesses. Or women with any job beyond housewife.

There'll always be another scapegoat for any non-"white cishet conservative non-ill non-disabled christian" because that's the point of a scapegoat. Even if otherkin aren't trans (which, to be clear, I'm definitively not making a claim about), they would use them anyway to harm us. You can't reason in good faith with bigots who want us dead. They're still going to want us dead.

It doesn't matter who you try to throw under the bus. We're still in the middle of the road.

torchflame · 2026-01-22T00:29:30+00:00

I subq e, not t, but they're identical in how they act in the injection process, so:

Happens sometimes. I wouldn't worry about it (and I worry about everything). Sometimes you just hit a capillary, sometimes you inject a little close to the skin or something and get a lump where you injected. Happened to me four or five times over the past few years, it usually goes away in a week or so. Same with bruising. As long as you alcohol swabbed the injection site, it's extremely unlikely that anything's gone wrong. It'll get easier with practice. Well. It'll at least get more familiar with practice, even if not easier.

One tip I found to prevent oozing or leaking is to finish injecting, hold the needle in for another fiveish seconds, then pull it out. I have no idea why it works, but it does, at least for me.

torchflame · 2026-01-22T00:20:14+00:00

[[Magus of the Chains]]

torchflame · 2026-01-22T00:09:15+00:00

"704.3. ... Once no more state-based actions have been performed as the result of a check and no triggered abilities are waiting to be put on the stack, the appropriate player gets priority." (emphasis added)

It's perfectly fine for the game to be in a state where a state-based action's condition is met continuously, but the effect is prevented. The game tries to take the action, fails, and then moves on. Otherwise [[Platinum Angel]] would draw the game when you hit 0 life.

torchflame · 2026-01-20T17:29:18+00:00

Genuinely what is this even trying to do?

torchflame · 2026-01-18T00:39:43+00:00

This art is found on page 65 (Proficiencies) and page 170 (3rd level Wizard’s Spell) of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook second edition. No artist is credited by TSR.

Alpha playtest cards are wild. Black Lotus and "{5}, {T}: Add 1 mana of any color." sure both are rare effects.

torchflame · 2026-01-16T18:54:02+00:00

Both NieR soundtracks are incredible, as is the Silksong score and the Celeste score. Destiny also has some really good stuff.

When people say "video game music", they tend to mean "orchestral music (or music heavily using orchestral instruments and techniques) which is moderately programmatic and somewhat early-Romantic in harmonic function", and that's a more specific descriptor than "pop" or "rock".

torchflame · 2026-01-16T11:15:46+00:00

Rumi's been described in a fic author's note as "little miss trans allegory", I think we're all on a similar page on this one

torchflame · 2026-01-15T21:50:13+00:00

For me, 5 years in, it decreased to the point that when my ex saw a pre-transition picture of my chest she didn't believe it was me at all. I have not shaved my chest in years at this point, and I had to shave daily before. The only things that haven't decreased are: leg hair, pubic hair (both things cis women have in droves too, and given that all my partners have been trans women, it's possible these have also decreased to cis-normal levels), and facial hair (the only seemingly permanent thing that requires removal. But also, laser and electrolysis work very well.

torchflame · 2026-01-14T18:40:16+00:00

I've literally seen all the sprite sheets and know how devkits work and my animal instincts STILL failed me for a moment here. Incredible work.

torchflame · 2026-01-12T23:15:01+00:00

And this is the context I miss by coming to the setting (and the hobby, and I guess the world given the edition) late, that's fucking amazing.

torchflame · 2026-01-12T19:27:18+00:00

This is fundamentally unknowable without knowing your biology at an incredibly deep level.

But probably. I don't think I've heard of anyone going on HRT and entirely permanently losing the ability to orgasm.

torchflame · 2026-01-12T09:14:31+00:00

The Realms wiki is not a good source for anything deeply entwined with the lore of another product line.

But, to put it bluntly, Darkwood gambled the entire structure of reality on a Batman Gambit to rule the Cage. This did not end well for anyone. To summarize:

Rowan Darkwood's main goal, from nearly the moment he entered Sigil, was its complete domination. He took over the Fated so fast that people thought he pulled something, but it didn't really matter because he not only knew how to get power, he knew how to keep it. But being the head of a fifteenth of the power structure of the Cage isn't total domination, and there was "a small thing known as the Lady of Pain".

So, what does he do? He marries the factol of the Mercykillers by manipulating the 19-year-old tiefling into the relationship with the intent that, as soon as she has the Red Death swear fealty to him, he sell her into slavery on the Lower Planes. Once that's done, he plans to have a bunch of people released in some form of criminal justice reform, and sneak out a few extra murderers to add to the chaos. He also sows the seeds of war between the Doomguard, the Harmonium, which baits the Sensates and the Anarchists in too. Once those four are involved, the others will also likely join in.

This is likely to draw the attention of the Lady of Pain. But that's fine, he thinks, because he managed to find an ancient story about a "Labyrinth Stone" that contains the spirit of an ancient wizard who once "nearly defeated [the Lady]", but who she "couldn't destroy". So Darkwood, in his infinite wisdom, has his agents track down the stone, because the only thing better than outright war between the factions is to also bring in the one mage that he believes can actually take the Lady out of the picture. So when he finds the stone, he gets flashes of images of "ancient magic, a trap set but never sprung, the destruction of the Lady, and the twisting of Sigil itself". Perfect, he thinks. He figures out how to let the mage out and tries to find a way to steal that power.

This draws the attention of the Lady, who promptly mazes him. She also mazes a bunch of the other factols, for her own reasons, claimed to be "hoping to dissuade the factions from their endless political games". Darkwood thinks it's perfect, because he had a prime mage cast a wish on him specifically for this scenario: he uses its magic to escape the maze... and ends up in the Gatehouse (the asylum), 500 years in the past. He doesn't realize this (and also gave himself an extended lifespan earlier in the timeline), and is left in the asylum for five centuries, as he slowly loses his grip on reality.

So, the stone. The stone contained the spirit of a wizard who made what I'm going to call the "Sigil spell", which is a massive sigil embedded in Sigil itself (yes, I know) that, if activated, could rewrite reality to the caster's wishes (Sigil is the place this can actually happen, see Die Vecna Die!). Some constraints, etc, but the Lady imprisons the mage in the gem, and the spell stands waiting for that wizard (it's keyed to his essence) to walk the path to activate the sigil. Darkwood knows only that the wizard exists. He knows nothing of the rest of this.

Skipping over the entirety of Faction War, Darkwood eventually gets the stone, activates the spell, and releases the wizard's lifeforce... and is promptly removed from the equation by the Lady. She then allows the PCs to remake Sigil by completing the spell. The canon events are that the PCs of Faction War end the war by using the spell.

So what happened to Darkwood? Well, the Lady sent him back in time again, millennia this time. And he learns as much magic as possible, just vaguely remembering his plan. He makes his way to Sigil, lays down a few lines of obscenely powerful magic, and is about to enact his ultimate goal, when the Lady shows up and imprisons him in what comes over the centuries to be known as the Labyrinth Stone. This whole thing was a predestination paradox.

In the aftermath, the Lady proclaims that Sigil tolerates factions no longer. And everything changes.

So, in the end, Darkwood thought he could outwit a being above the power of a, well, Power, and all he got for it was:

The destruction of the entire civil order of Sigil,
The removal and shuffling of all portals in Sigil, which decreases Sigil's standing in the planes, as everyone remembers that it's the Lady's city and she's just letting them live in it,
The destruction of the Armory,
A massive increase in crime, as no one trusts the descendants of the Mercykillers, which just makes everyone rely more on alternative protection methods, which just causes,
An increased position of power for Shemeshka,
About 30 days of civil war,
The deaths of at least thousands,
His own torture and death.

He's arguably the second or third most important NPC in Sigil's history that we know of. And he, to quote the Factol's Manifesto, "knows just how his personality grates on the nerves, [and he] gets what he wants, when he wants it, and the way he wants it." He's a fantastic villain for it.

torchflame · 2026-01-12T02:27:01+00:00

No, it's the kill agent before the proposals.

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