Yvonne MacStitch

you can just set a game in Toronto. Even a visual novel

if you recreate a space you're personally familiar with and have a connection to, your representation of that place will carry those feelings with it! that's a thing you can just do!

My upcoming novel(tm) is set in a thinly-fictionalized version of my hometown exactly for this reason! At some point, I realized that I could just talk about my own town and community and, like, who was going to stop me?

the verdant alleys with murals, the cold winters, the postal service, the abundant parks, the comic festival (that used to be held in one such park)

I never name places in my books, but

Still thinking about that Lilith Rose post I saw the other day, turns out I already have them not only blocked but they're banned from cohost. I don't consider myself a smart person, nor very good with theory as people call it, but if I wrote half of what they did, I'd just immediately throw myself into the ocean.

People did a breakdown of the presumptions and dynamics at play, like turning a minority coaster into the spokesperson for an entire group that the whole idea of orientalism rests on their rhetorical ability, and I get that, I can see that play out with my own eyes, but its still so damn right weird someone would treat a post online like they're on a thesis panel attacking someone's dissertation.

The "I'm just playing devil's advocate here" every couple of lines and my face was sucking in like I'm choking on a lemon. I really feel this is the kind of person the term pseudointellectual was made for.

A claymore is just any bladed weapon that runs a length from my foot to my shoulder.

A Sharpened Baguette is a claymore.

I don't know what to add to the authenticity over food post, but rather than looking at things like specific ingredients, we can take a dish apart in the abstract and think about what is its essense. An apple pie is just fruit in a puff pastry, which can be 'traditional' to many different cultures but I don't think making it differently is going to make it too much of anothers culture one way or another, its going to be what you intend with it.

You might be able to trace a trend with national dishes to work out a core commonality to them, in the UK's case that is 'meat in somekind of gravy' which is believed how chicken tikka masala became a national dish that surprizes people, but as the story goes an Indian-Scottish Chef used what he had left at the end of a shift for a bus driver in Glasgow. Huge success and made more of it and it grew in populatity till it became a store shelf staple.

I don't think its more or less than any other national dish like Steak and Ale Pie because it fundamentally is 'Meat in somekind of Gravy'. If I ever wind up in an alien biome from removed from Scotland, first thing I'm going to do is go out and find the closest analogue to potatoes, and hunt space-cows to make stovies. It won't be the same ingredients, but it fulfils my abstract criteria of "Meat in somekind of Mash" so I would consider it essentially Scottish. Taste might be a bit different to what I'm used to being on another planet though.