Walking Over A Grave

I walked past my grandfather’s grave for the first time this week.

Content Warning: Family, graveyards

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/walking-over-a-grave/

Dev Pile: Constraint Cascades in Moonshiners

June involved writing an absolute spoonfull of stuff on the Moonshiners case study, and that involved revising it further and further. What I have here in this post, down below the fold, is one such example of a big chunk of case study writing, in the ‘pre-revision’ stage. An important part of this process is getting words out there, so I can refine them, and a big part of that for me is making sure that every day I can look back on it and say ‘oh hey, yeah, I wrote about a thousand goddamn words there.,’ Guess what you’re getting to see today, if you want to see my thinking before I’ve converted it into proper formal academic language? Yeah, it’s one of those!

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-constraint-cascades-in-moonshiners/ #Moonshiners

Meet the OC: Heiroglyph

Heiroglyph is a title. He says he’s a cursed name – someone made him long ago, using language magic to give him life for a deeply worrying purpose. He lay dormant, carved in stone, forgotten when that language died… until someone translated him. Now he walks a world overflowing with words. Did you know some things can read and remember text without being people? Wonderfully convenient for a desert-born scourge with a curse older than oceans.

Approaching Heiroglyph is like trying to pet a cat made of tar – either you never make contact, or something sticks forever. He’s friendly, mostly. Don’t bother asking his real name. He’ll smile and say, “You wouldn’t survive it.”

But you can call him Seikh, for convenience. Sounds like Seek.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/meet-the-oc-heiroglyph/ #CityOfHeroes #MyOCs

Story Pile: My Master Has No Tail (Manga)

My Master Has No Tail is a 2019 manga, which got a 2022 anime adaptation, making it one of a number of truly excellent anime in an excellent year of excellent anime. It’s the story of Mameda, a tanuki girl from a rural island, who travels to Osaka for an adventure of playful mischief! The problem is, this is the Taisho era of Japan (which is around 1912 to 1926), and her tricks are decidedly Meiji (which is the era before that). Turning leaves into coins meant more when the coins were important, but people check paper money for counterfeits, which ruins her plan. A spooky light on the road at night? That’s just a car, nobody’s that scared of it.

Distressed by her lack of success, Mameda winds up encountering rakugo theatre for the first time, and now I get to explain rakugo again.

Chances are good that you might, if you’re a big anime dork or general theatre nerd. Rakugo is a specific form of Japanese theatre, a formalised type of one-person performance where a storyteller relates common, familiar stories, reinvented and redelivered, and told with a standardised set of props and items, within specific limitations. It is an art form formalised beyond almost all western types of theatre, where even forms like opera with specific lyrics and performance rule at least let you choose to some extent where on the stage you’re going to do it. Rakugo, you gotta have your knees on one cushion.

My Akane-Banashi review

And like every major character headlining a manga series about rakugo, Mameda realises rakugo is awesome, and then begins the obligatory story of Trying To Get Into Rakugo, despite the forces stacked against her. The forces are her master, the woman whose rakugo she’s seeking to emulate.

If you’re sensitive to spoilers, I’m going to describe some of the events in the manga My Master Has No Tail, in a broad sense, and that means spoiling some of the events in the anime.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/story-pile-my-master-has-no-tail-manga/ #CanSayIt #MyMasterHasNoTail #Rakugo

The Pokédex Is For And By Kids

I am cursed, as a fan of things, to have too-strong a desire that what I talk about to be acceptably real.

This past week I saw someone in the Ranma ½ Subreddit forward a theory – well, not even, they asked if anyone else already had the same idea – that Ranma Saotome’s poor performance in school is not because he is kind of stupid and the storyteller is trying to communicate that with his stupid actions and the school results he has that look a lot like what a stupid person would get, but rather, because he’s actually very fluent in American English. Now, this is a beautiful theory. I really do mean it, and I have to assume this is an idea the person in question holds to because they can use that idea, in their head, to get something, to go somewhere. I could never come up with something so beautifully out-of-context.

That’s not to say I am unwhimsical when considering fiction! I have a tiny drop or two of whimsy, smeared about the edges and dull in all but the most potent of UV lights. Let me then present to you a completely unfounded opinion, of my own, about the Pokédex, in Pokemon.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/the-pokedex-is-for-and-by-kids/ #pokemon

4e Design Philosophy

4th edition Dungeons & Dragons is an interesting platform to develop game material for. For a start it seems to be reasonably unpopular and the people who are looking for material for it don’t necessarily exist with the same attitude towards game design as I have.

On the other hand, it is a way to engage with a well-developed functional Dungeons & Dragons game without ever giving money to the people at Wizards of the Coast, who it seems have been doing some classic union busting nonsense lately and that sucks. I haven’t given Wizards any money for going on ten years now, I think, but that doesn’t stop me from being in their ecosystem and implicitly encouraging their presence in the hobby. To that end I just wanna remind people they abused Orion Black and they deadnamed employees who wanted to form a union.

What a bunch of pricks.

Anyway, I want to talk about some of my own philosophy for 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/4e-design-philosophy/ #DnD4e

Game Pile: Baba Is You

Baba Is You is a puzzle video game, created by Hempuli, a Finnish independent videogame developer, who released the game in 2017 at first and has not stopped being released since, on every platform as it becomes available. Baba Is You is a delightful puzzle game with a clear aesthetic, and is simply one of the most unreviewable things I’ve ever played.

It’s not that it resists analysis; it’s that it provides its own analysis just by existing.

The nature of the kind of puzzles in Baba Is You is that it’s very possible for the solution to a puzzle and the epiphany that follows to be uniquely enjoyable, and to that end I have avoided presenting any example solutions to anything I know in the game. I think if I ever do make a video about this, it will be mostly me wandering around in the overworld while I yap, because Baba Is You is a game that I feel has a different relationship to spoilers than most games with a more conventional fictional narrative.

Showing you a completed crossword puzzle would, after all, make that crossword puzzle less interesting.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/game-pile-baba-is-you/

A Half-Year Towards A Pull-Up

Back in the 1990s, I was a child and I watched a movie called American Beauty.

It was, I think, my first encounter with a piece of cinema that I considered adult, that it wasn’t easy to like or enjoy. I remember it left quite an impression on me because of some of the ideas in it, just the notion of thinking about what I was looking at and not necessarily enjoying media, but enjoying sitting with the thoughts a piece of media gave me.

It’s a pretty horrifying movie in hindsight, especially knowing a lot more than we do now about the people involved, but it is fundamentally a movie about a guy having a midlife crisis and responding to this by trying to fuck a teenager and then getting shot in the head by his gay neighbor who couldn’t handle being in a closet.

It isn’t a movie that’s aged well in my mind.

Nonetheless, one of the things I do is to try and thoughtfully analyze the forebears of what I do and the things that are in my head that I relate to meaningfully. One of the things that that movie included was the notion of a guy who hit his 40s, realized he wasn’t good looking or in shape, and decided to do something about it. There’s a moment where the main character starts to run alongside his gay neighbors. They ask, what are you doing? Why do you want to do this? The response? “I want to look good naked.”

Emotionally, that’s where I am.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/a-half-year-towards-a-pull-up/

Dev Pile: Materiality and Dinner Plates

I’m exploring a mechanism today, a kind of drafting mechanic, and I want to talk about in light of its relationship to stuffness and abstraction. Basically, here’s me starting with a mechanism and then talking about the other elements that follow based on the game.

The mechanic is:

A player drafts an identity that sets rules and goals from them off the top of a deck, and then pass it on. There are ways to change the drafting set, but players have some awareness of the next card in the deck, meaning they are aware of information about the next player.

This isn’t a a simultaneous draft like Sushi Go or LFG, where there are hands of cards that move around the table at the same time. It’s much more of a draft like seen in Mafia Del Cuba where the players select rolls or diamonds, which are small objects easily palmed in the hand under the cover of the box.

With that, the game has a defined mechanic and the next questions are the abstraction and the stuff.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-materiality-and-dinner-plates/

June 2026 Wrapup!

Hey if you were thinking about making a joke about ‘wrath month’, let me be clear that my stance is they’re all wrath months but also July is disability pride month and I think ignoring that is a sure way to make disabled folks who care about that (which isn’t all of them, I’m sure) feel like you don’t care about them. Just worth knowing about.

But June is done for and now there’s no more posts that will ever be in June 2026 on press dot invincible dot ink! If you want to read any such thing, you’ll have to read through these, a readability-selected cream-of-the-crop that I hope will inform, enlighten, and delight you!

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/june-2026-wrapup/

Story Pile: Can We Hang Out Sometime, by Good Kid

Can We Hang Out Sometime is a 2026 album (like, two months ago, April, to be specific), by the band Good Kid. Good Kid are a band that’s existed since 2018, and released singles over the past eight years, but which have only recently bundled their songs together into ‘an album.’ Knowing this, going into it, I didn’t expect this album to have any kind of narrative the way that other more structured albums from my listening have been, which meant any narrative or pattern I found, I figured, was just going to be much more representative of the themes that this author engages with.

Oh yeah, author, hang on, just in case you’re new here and not familiar with the work of Roland Barthes, I talk about ‘the author’ of a work as a character who is perceivable as the person that is ‘saying’ the things the album is saying. I don’t mean to psychoanalyse the actual people who made the album, this is just about listening to the songs and trying to treat them sincerely as if the song itself is a completed text.

For an overall sound, Can We Hang Out Sometime reminds me of two specific bands; it has a jangly, irregular sound that reminds me of Franz Ferdinand, and it has a plaintive, nerd-culture-adjacent (which is these days just ‘the culture’) vocalist and song style that reminds me of Imagine Dragons. The actual lyrics of the songs (the things I think I’m best equipped to engage with, because I am not good with music) tend towards asymmetries in emotional exchanges, where two parties have different needs out of the same thing. There’s a lot of emotional uncertainty, and the lyricist seems to really like the device where they start out with a mundane, material placement in the world, and then the lyrics drift away from what’s happening. The lyrics naturally have repetition, because, you know, it’s a song, but the choice of phrases also seems to me to suggest the singer is trying to convey an anxiety.

The vocalist isn’t doing a lot of ridiculous acrobatics; I think of this as a ‘singable’ album, where someone with my middling masc-base range can probably follow along with the song, and only occasionally disappoint the people around me listening to me.

What follows from here is my track-by-track notes and some final thoughts, so I guess if you care about… spoilers? For songs? That may make you think of how they sound, in a single particular way? Then you could avoid this.

If you want to listen to the album, here!

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/story-pile-can-we-hang-out-sometime-by-good-kid/ #CanWeHangOutSometime #GoodKid #Music

Trans Ally, Paul

That’s a joke, of course. Paul, as in Biblical Paul, was by no means an ally of anyone, and based on a reading of the things we’re confident he said, if he was going to be waving any pride flags, it’d be the asexual one, and quite possibly the one that’s probably out there somewhere for ‘what if you cut off your own balls?’ Like the dude seems to think the ideal Christian is a Ken Doll that knows how to talk.

But, nonetheless, there is a part of the Bible that has a degree of legitimacy, as a ‘real’ Christian text, that Christians do reference and do ostensibly respect, and which it’s hard to look at, with an understanding of trans identities and the assumptions of Christianity being true, that doesn’t end up at being Paul Says Trans Rights.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/trans-ally-paul/

Pokegenders and Pokesex

Pokemon have sexes and Pokemon have genders but they have neither and instead have another, different, unrelated thing.

Let me explain.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/pokegenders-and-pokesex/ #pokemon

Game Pile: Fog of Love

https://youtu.be/gkwY1vxJNPo

Thumbnail below the fold!

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/game-pile-fog-of-love/ #FogOfLove #TalkyTimes

Gideon Nav’s Vore Lore

The Locked Tomb is a book series that pitches itself with a clean, simple premise: lesbian necromancers in space. That is what it offers and that is what you get. It is a premise that delights me not because it’s just pithy but because this is a series of books that seems intent on screwing every single aspect of meaning it can out of those four words. This is a book where there are lesbians, and those lesbians are presented in a variety of different ways. There are normie lesbians and there are messed up lesbians and there are creepy lesbians and there are uncertain lesbians and there are naive and possibly even asexual lesbians. They are necromancers, and every different type of necromancer a reasonably competent Dungeons & Dragons player could come up with when desperately trying to find an angle the Dungeonmaster hadn’t thought of. And space? Yep, outer space is a big part of the story, both in how big it is and how things being in a particular position or location are important to the story.

But there’s that other word.

That little word.

In.

Because oh my, this is a story that does a lot with ‘in.’

I’m going to have to talk about The Locked Tomb’s world and things in it which means necessarily if you’re spoiler averse for a series that starts with a mystery novel, then you should go read that first, then come back to read this weird article that will, inevitably, wind up talking about vore. That is where it started in my notes and that’s where it’s going to end up.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/gideon-navs-vore-lore/ #TheLockedTomb

Dev Pile: Moonshiner Artist Brief Part 2

Last week I showed the thinking that built the description of archetypes and character concepts that went into Moonshiner’s art brief, and now I’m just going to show you that art brief. Here’s the text I handed to the artist a month or so ago.

This is a list of characters, with simple descriptor giving a generalised race, a gender marker, and a job; the job describes the kind of outfit I’ve got in mind for them, and the concept gives an idea for the character, and a description to give specific details about the character that follow from that. This is meant to try and communicate to someone who doesn’t have my necessary reference frame (though I think I do use some common reference points).

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/moonshiner-artist-brief-part-2/

How To Be Korra (In 4e D&D)

How To Be is a series I’ve been writing for a few years now and an important part of that has been making sure there’s no strong bias towards making lots of boring dudes who hit things as their main way of interacting with the world.

Here’s a girl whose main way of interacting with the world is hitting them, and maybe hitting on them.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/how-to-be-korra-in-4e-dd/ #DnD4e #HowToBe

Story Pile: Bookish

If you’d asked me any time before I watched Bookish what I thought of Mark Gattis, all my memory would dredge up is how HBomberguy, the man who fixed plagairism forever a year after the public release of ChatGPT, dismissed Gattis’ work on the show Sherlock. That was a fun video about a series I didn’t like, that seems perfectly acceptable to integrate into my idea space. Apparently Gattis is one of Those Guys in British media, someone who has been contributing efforts to shows that are already successful and the work of other people who are, similarly, making successful shows. I didn’t know much about him at this point beyond that he was a gay guy who worked on Sherlock and Dr Who, shows I haven’t cared enough about to watch much of at all.

He is the central pitch to Bookish as best I can tell – someone whose name is important enough to attach to the series in the marketing, and he plays the main character, Gabriel Books. This aggressively twee British snob detective joins the ranks of so many other prior twee British snob detectives, and the series that follows his adventures of running a bookstore (with occasional incidents of solving murder mysteries) is called Bookish.

Spoiler Warning: Look, I’m not planning on spoiling much about Bookish, but there’s a reason I’m talking about it in June, right? If the theme of my month is Pride month, you’re going to have to expect me to talk about some Pridey stuff, and that’s going to necessitate a spoiler. There are only six episodes of Bookish at the moment, they’re not particularly hard to find on various online players, and if you’re really invested in being surprised by the plot point, I’m going to reveal, you should watch it first.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/story-pile-bookish/

When Transformers Invented Girls

Transformers is a toy brand made by a company mostly staffed by dudes, aiming at a market sector that is mostly dudes, informed almost entirely by business ideologies that were also constructed by dudes, thanks to the actions and regulation changes established by dudes. The toys were made in waves of bulk characterisation and branding exercises, pieces made for toying around with, and then advertised through stories that tried to expand on those characters.

Starting in 1984, Transformers were all men and some boys, by default, and the writers pumping out scripts full time managed to get fifty episodes in before they realised they could make a character who was a woman. In The Search for Alpha Trion, Transformers introduced six women, who were let’s gently call them stock characters, and they showed up for one episode as guest spots.

In The Movie, the big continuity shake-up, the first ‘regular’ woman character was introduced, named Arcee. Arcee is therefore the earliest example I can find of a transgender character in Transformers, introduced in 1986.

Oh, you didn’t know Arcee is Trans?

I mean she probably shouldn’t be, because oh lords, this was a mess.

Content Warning: Just to be clear I’m about to talk about a really bad idea and a botched story that involved someone who has a pretty thin skin about being told his writing sucks, even when the writing nakedly sucks. This isn’t about some delightful uplifting story about how Trans People Have Been Here All Along, it’s much more about ‘Wow, Cis Guys Don’t Even Think About Cis Women As Being Real People’ kinda thing.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/when-transformers-invented-girls/ #Transformers

The Woman in the Well and why Corellon Sucks

Look, let me be clear: This is a safe space for the haters of Corellon Larethian. I can’t attest for how well and how long I’ve been able to hold this opinion, but after watching this lengthy video from Distracted Elf, it crystallised a whole variety of things I assumed were ‘pretty much true’ in the timeline of my experience with Dungeons & Dragons.

Corellon Larethian is an ongoing character, a god, from the Forgotten Realms. His origin is the 1980 book Deities & Demigods by James Ward and Robert Kuntz, which introduced the character, and then he – and yes, I’m using he for Corellon, fight me for the gender identity of a fictional character – was further developed by his integration into the Forgotten Realms by one Ed Greenwood.

One could pick through Corellon’s over-detailed mythic history for days, and it’s great fun to do that, because the guy sucks indescribably, and I think it’s important to hold to the actual textual values of the thing we pay money for. 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons is my favourite edition but make no mistake, it is not perfect, and because I like it so much, when I find the ways it sucks, it stings all the harder. 3rd edition was written by bozos, 5th edition is for newbies, but 4th edition shouldn’t have awful writing in it, it’s the one I like. Anything in the other forms, that’s not my circus and not my monkeys, but I know where this particular poo was flung from.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/the-woman-in-the-well-and-why-corellon-sucks/ #DnD4e