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Not here: You're making a distinction that I don't think is quite so distinctive as you seem to think, but I'm not in a mood to argue with you today. So I guess I'll allow you to continue to be both wrong and unchallenged.

It it's your browser being weird, it's mine being weird, too.

It's Scalzi at his Scalziest. I wouldn't say there's no depth there, but there's not much. I enjoyed it plenty, but I have known susceptibility to at least some kinds of authorial voice. :LOL:

I might go as far as "I've never seen that," but it's aiming at similar points, I think--though I do prefer to deploy that when what I've never seen is a thing someone says is inevitable.

Nothing like seeing people responding to one of your posts, and realizing it's not far from gibberish. Oops and oh comma well.

Seems to me as though good "monsters" can exist for approximately the same reasons as good NPCs.

Nah. I never bought Mean Mark as anything supernatural ... :LOL:

I wouldn't have listed any of those as my "ideal monk fights" before seeing any of them for the first time, here. I'm not convinced any of them is particularly like what either of the players who had monk PCs in my games had in mind what their characters looked like in action; and if I were to...

Yeah, there's that. In my case it's that I spent so much with that as work that I can't do it for fun. I have similar problems with podcasts, and I've never spent any time making those--but just listening to someone talk in my headphones ... it needs to be something I'm really interested in.

I worked recording them. I cannot listen to them for pleasure. It's a me thing, and my own mental block--it's not a judgment on them or the people who listen to them.

The difference between the experience of free-writing a novel is, to me, very like the experience of GMing a TRPG when there's no pre-planned series of events. I presume you would say that the TRPG session is not a story--and I mostly agree--but could session notes be one? How much editing, how...

It appears as though you require "story" to be pre-planned, That'd seem to imply that a free-written novel wouldn't meet your definition of "story.' I'm not saying you're wrong, exactly--this is (or would be) very much an edge-case, and just about all positions have edge-cases that make them...

Yeah, there are almost certainly feedback loops going on. My sense is that the more the players know the game is focused on their characters's goals and actions and desires and priorities and needs, the less they try to screw around with the GM (which usually carries at least a whiff of...

I had a player who wanted to try to push edge-case things. Eventually we came to the understanding that rulings were more likely to go his way if he wasn't trying to extract them in the moment, that he didn't need to surprise me to surprise his opponents. I've also come to a conclusion that's...

If I were running a game for my friends with advanced degrees in things like particle astrophysics or developmental neurobiology or computational theoretical physical chemistry, we might have to work out what I needed to do, worldwise, to support their suspension of disbelief. (In the Fantasy...

Alas, that sort of heightened language simply does not convey to film. Also alas, it's fallen severely out of fashion.

I would have preferred to claw my way into middle management. :LOL:

I don't think I am. I mean, it wasn't a life-goal or anything. We were a federal contractor and the agency we contracted with yanked the work out from under us.

Mine is forced retirement. I can't recommend the "forced" part.

There was a point in my life when I would read more than one book at a time. At this point I think they'd all have to be non-narrative nonfiction for me to do that. Part of how many days a book will take me to read is how many hours per day I'll give it; that's a large part of what I'll have to...