Gwen

I don't talk much about my love (respect? appreciation?) for Lodoss--something I never really thought about until I read Dia's article last year. And then it clicked. I rarely talk about Lodoss like I rarely talk about Mystic Quest. For me, it was Lodoss before D&D, Tolkien, Le Guin, all of it. Mystic Quest before Final Fantasy, Shadowrun, Baldur's Gate, and so on. Not just temporally. I mean Lodoss and MQ led me to those worlds. Of course they're wildly different things, both in themselves and in relation to their context. And I wouldn't call MQ wildly influential in the way Lodoss was.

But they're riffs, adaptations, dilutions (whatever we want to call them) that, amid the genericness, have so much goddamn heart.

Anyway, read the piece above.

It's interesting to play some Fortnite after playing a bunch of Marvel: Snap all weekend.

It's not like you'll catch me defending Fortnite for it's myriad of issues, but if there's one thing that really does work for the game it's the season pass. It costs $10, runs for about two and a half to three months, comes with a bunch of new cosmetic items, music, loading screens, characters, and emotes to unlock, and its goals are varied and myriad. Among other trials, this season I have: rung doorbells to trick or treat, looked for specific candies during the Halloween event, got bounties from Star Wars Stormtroopers, fought Darth Vader (again), turned myself into an Alex Mack chrome blob and plummeted seven stories without taking fall damage, and had to pick 3 fruits from trees planted by other players in previous matches. It's pretty varied!

Meanwhile, a $10 season pass in Marvel Snap consists of challenges like play fifteen 2 cost cards, win 15 matches, or win a location with 20 or more power 25 times. And your return for this grind is... a Miles Morales card, a variant Miles Morales card with the same abilities, a bunch of variants to Spider-Man themed cards you already have, and a smattering of upgrade/crafting resources. Woo?

Don't get me wrong: Fortnite only can do this because it operates at scale. Hundreds of programmers and artists are working behind the scenes to ensure that every week a new 3D action adventure is happening in the background of Fortnite's battle royale, and it can't operate that way /without/ that exploitation. But at the same time: $10 for a month-long grind for one or two exclusive cards and a bunch of cosmetics that amount to JPEGs of art done by comic artists years ago (who almost certainly see no royalties) that you earn by just grinding numbers down really isn't as appealing.

I guess what I'm saying is that season passes are either sustainable but probably not worth it, or worth it but probably unsustainable. It is not a great set up.

I've been watching Kamen Rider Black Sun and I love this old man. Tired messy fucked up protagonists really are the best.

• hitting j/k on the timeline to move down/up a post.
• an inline post editor so i don't have to go to a new page every time i want to repost something
• inline comments on posts for the same reason
• actually why can't i just alt+click to repost something without bringing up the post editor at all, that would be nice. tumblr used to have that.
• bookmarking posts, like how you can bookmark tweets. it would be nice to be able to bookmark a post i liked to find it again later without having to go looking for it.
• let me paste images into posts from my clipboard instead of having to manually upload them from my computer???