also while Colonel Sanders was in the military and was a Colonel, he was not a Colonel while he was in the military. he was granted the honorary title of Colonel by the governor of Kentucky, and in that sense the title is more akin to receiving an honorary doctorate than any expectation or ability to lead a military unit. thus it is my opinion that Sanders should be struck from this list, leaving General Tso Tsung-t'ang as the undisputed greatest military commander of all time, lacking any peers.

Complete list of the greatest military geniuses of all time

General Tso Tsung-t'ang

Colonel Harland Sanders

the rest of them don't even have a decent chicken recipe, so we're done

someone stop me from making a whole set of this, please

i know an engineer-type dude who said fiction bored him, because fiction is mostly-formulaic and tropey, and you can generally guess what’s gonna happen next, and yada yada

so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise

apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time

then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years

and god i think about him all the time.  like.  that is the most wild way to process fiction that i have ever heard of, but also, i’ve gotta admire the sheer chaos energy of it

Brain: "Why aren't you doing anything? You're never gonna improve if you don't do anything, you'll never make anything of yourself if you just sit there and do nothing."

Me: "Fine, I'll try and make something."

Brain: "Oh, you're making something? You're genuinely trying to do something, and it isn't coming out absolutely perfectly?"

Me: "I mean, yeah, of course it isn't perfect, bu-"

Brain: "How *dare* you try to make something! Look at this, it's shit! All shit! Throw it into the garbage, set it on fire, then leap in after it! You're not blowing it out of the park, therefore you're worthless, so might as well die!"

Me:

y’know, if instead of hating myself for not making things every time I wanted to try to make something, I instead actually tried to make something, I’d probably have made a lot more things 

unfortunately, I’ve realized this about a decade too late to undo how much I’ve hurt myself with my old philosophy

Yeah, sure, the government forgot that they had their replicators set to ‘bombs’ rather than ‘masks’, that’s why there’s a shortage. Oh, wait, that only exists in Star Trek. Maybe the government can walk into all those bomb factories they own and tell them that they’re now going to make masks. Ah, dammit, they don’t actually own the bomb factories, do they? Well, then the government will tell the people who own the bomb factories to make masks instead. Except no, because the bomb factories have equipment and materials for making bombs, not masks. I’m sure a mask made of RDX and steel will work wonderfully in keeping out the virus. And even assuming that they would switch over their production to masks, that would mean getting rid of all their bomb making equipment, materials, and personnel trained in making bombs, and then replace it all with the equivalent for making masks. Then they actually have to make the masks, whereupon they have to be shipped off to where masks are needed, then distributed to people who need the masks, and all of that is completely ignoring all the overhead our market economy imposes, but nevertheless means ‘we won’t have masks now, but we will later’ and hey, isn’t that what’s being said right now?

You know, you’d think that knowing the answer on how to get myself to keep writing would make it easy to apply it. After all, I manage to put together a session for my tabletop group pretty much every week, so the answer is clearly to just get it out there, and then obligation to other people will keep my going. Yet, despite knowing that, I never do that. It’s always something else on top of that, like “I don’t have enough to put out there” or “I have no idea where to put the sort of stuff I’d like to write” or “I have no idea if I’m even a good writer, so why should I take the chance of exposing people to something that is potentially garbage”.

And yet, still, I have that answer. Maybe I’ll be able to do something with it.

always and forever

Everybody declaring that we should eat the rich has clearly forgotten that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

Naming characters is an absolute joy, and reminds me of a little saga from the Exalted tabletop game I ran. A little backstory in that Exalted naming conventions are all over the place - one guy might be named something recognizable as name like Volk, while another might have a flowery literally-translated-wuxia name like Ardent Emerald. So, I decided to have some fun with this and have a series of friendly NPCs to assist the party be apart of the Red Fish family, named so because all of their names followed the pattern [shade of red] [type of fish].

So, first my players met the information broker Ruby Minnow, as part of them getting together as a party. Later on they met a sorcerer named Crimson Trout, who helped them with some demon business. Next was the boat-merchant-who-didn’t-ask-too-many-questions Vermilion Bass and his pirate wannabe son Sanguine Barracuda. My players thought they hit the punchline when I introduced Salmon Salmon, a village priest who helped them in beating up a rogue god.

But I had one more trick up my sleeve, and it requires a little tangent to explain. So, throughout the first ‘arc’ of my game, there was a recurring minor villain who went by the sobriquet ‘Ominous Star of Death’. Very mysterious, wore a mask, but only seemed interested in collecting ancient and powerful swords rather than anything immediately world-threatening, so she was able to do her thing in somewhat peace. Until, of course, the party uncovered that no, her gathering swords actually was world-threatening, and they would have to treat her as a serious and major task.

However, they were just a smidgen too late in going to stop her, and Star successfully achieved her goal, using the swords to free her master from his centuries-long imprisonment to do as he pleased with Creation once more. His first words upon obtaining freedom? “Thank you, Red Herring.”

I wish I could have seen the looks on their faces.

People say that the best thing about being a writer is that you get to express yourself and share truths about the world or whatever

But the REAL best thing about being a writer is that you get to name characters things like Parsimony Schnapp.

Not to mention that increasing the punishment can cause people to say ‘well, I’m already going to jail forever anyways, might as well double down’. For instance, the Dazexiang Uprising, which was caused by the penalty for a soldier being late to their post being death, so they figured they might as well rebel if they were going to be executed.

The sacred mystery of any deterrence theory is that it should stop me from doing something I would otherwise do. If I claim that I am a typical person wrt this enforcement system, yet I would never do the Bad Thing, and if any circumstance that could push me to doing the Bad Thing wouldn’t be stopped by the deterrence, then what use is this punishment? It must only have in mind a vanishingly small portion of the populace.

Yet if I do admit “I would do the bad thing except for the threat levied here”, well uh, all of a sudden I would be treated as a degenerate and dangerous. Who can trust anyone that would murder you in your sleep, if they could get away with it?

Did some cleaning today. Found a stray doodle sheet. Right on the front were three words that still make me laugh all these hours later.

Nietzsche’s diss track.

You know, at the end of Ratatouille, wouldn’t that restaurant also get shut down by health inspectors for having a massive rat infestation?

So I have a dreamwidth now

Not quite jumping ship yet, considering I was barely on this ship in the first place, but for those of you who enjoy my dead silence and also desperately want a change from it, you can find me on dreamwidth at https://bmpixy.dreamwidth.org/ . I promise I’ll actually do stuff over there.

Late night unendorsed theory prompted by a conversation with a friend that possible spills into some heresies -

Men are attracted to strong, powerful women due to inheriting the love of Lilith from Adam. The reason this is not more widely expressed is due to the stealing of the baculum by God to form Eve, thus causing men to seek out women of her nature to reclaim that part of themselves that was lost.

Man, what the fuck do I have to do to be able to just have a thought and think ‘yeah, I think everybody else should know about this thought’, and then just go ahead and post it? 

ぶっ殺す。ぶっ殺す。ぶっ殺す。ぶっ殺す。ぶっ殺す。ぶっ殺す。

お前たちを俺の麻雀でぶっ殺す。急いで死ぬ。