i wasn’t supposed to write about roses or blood or silver, about hearts or wings or galaxies; my teacher used to press her hands, firmly, to the top of our poetry stacks and beg us - love different. she was bored of it. i’d go home and write something with each of her off-limits words, emboldened by spite.
for a stint of time, i was a reader for a poetry magazine, shifting through thousands of submitted writings, each hopefully printed onto my tiny laptop screen for next-submission-viewing. one editor had a pile where we would put all the poems with parsnips or cauliflower, one pile for long-thin emergency rants that devolved into a blank scream, one pile for mentions of belladonna and chartreuse - for a whole year, i’d go to bed hearing chartreuse and silver and cities playing in my head in calligraphy. every three months, the beautiful public eye would become just-fascinated by pretty things. unusual, beautiful monstrosities. one winter, all about daises. the next, a fascination with posies. i watched the world spin from catching love in language to the same five phrases - help, it’s ending, i’m alone, help, it’s dark here, come home, help -
later, as an english teacher, i saw patterns. every semester, one million essays about four specific things. it wasn’t pretty enough to be a teachable moment: the content they wanted to discuss was all extremely violent; a broken anthem of climate change and constantly being videoed is destroying us. i would wake up shaking, worried their visions were prophetic, soon-to-be-true. selfish, i couldn’t handle the constant semester-to-semester panic they scribbled into six paragraphs, MLA-formatted text. read the world is ending fifty times every month; sob to your therapist i’m not doing enough, tell your students: please, no more violence, i don’t have the right stomach.
each one seemed the same poem: we’re dying, and nobody is coming to save us.
there are very few celebration poems these days. i want to rest my hand on a stack of poems about love in big red wings. love in a jacket, standing under an open galaxy. love written on the bicep, in an anatomically correct heart, with an arrow shot through the center so you can see the pink viscera of surviving a wound - so you know that even permanent tattoos are permeable. blood on the snout of a newborn lamb. silver rings around the pink scales of a pigeon’s leg, and love with her hand around the ribs of a bird. i want to read boring essays about lunch. about which video games run the best graphics. about carnivals. about love in big cliche terms: standing in a garden of parsnips, clutching daises to her chest, eating raw meat over the body of a rich man.
i want to open the poetry magazine and have pages of sonnets about bluebells. about survival. about a mundane, beautiful spring. about sitting with your dog on a front porch, writing without spite, happily toying with the idea of ice cream.
my student sends me an email. i know you said to write about what brings you joy. but nothing really makes me happy these days. i don’t know what i’m doing.
when i wrote this 2 years ago, i put in the tags the other thing that was happening: right before covid, i had changed my tune. instead of telling my students here is what you can’t write, i asked them to please choose something that brought them joy. choose something beautiful. in college, i am not looking for a specific topic, there is no “winning” the essay, i am just making sure that you know how to format an essay and accurately cite your sources.
the world is pretty bleak right now, and many of my 19 year old kids are full of anger. my brother and i are teachers at the same time, but he is a professor in engineering. our colleges are owned by the same person. he calls me, frustrated, because he just got a student out of crisis, and now the financial aid office has sent the student right back into hell again. we talk about the administration being useless. we talk about feeling useless. we both say: i wish there was more i could do, but -
the world is pretty bleak right now, and i asked my kids to write about joy, because i couldn’t stomach what is unsaid in the above post: kids were writing too much about gun violence. they were writing about blood smeared across the hallways of their middle schools. i would get essays about how they huddled under a desk while the bell rang around them, this strange and eerie tune. one of the only times i told my siblings out loud i love you was while we had an active shooter. i was locked in a friend’s room up in a dorm while we all huddled around unwashed pastel dollar-store bowls. we called our families and loved ones. what else was there to do.
i couldn’t read any more of those accounts. how cowardly.
i wish i could say i was braver, that i heard the weight of what they were handling and was able to bear it, but it adds up. i had 50 to 100 students. every semester, at least 3 of them would have visceral memories of a school shooting. their friends and neighbors and loved ones. their hands shaking around their phone as they type out this message might be my last one. i couldn’t read that and stay calm. i had to call my mom. sob to my therapist - how the fuck do i resolve that. how do i help them? we both still have to go to school in the morning - me and my students. how am i supposed to just read that and then go on and teach them about prepositions? i can’t even promise they won’t ever have to experience that again. i feel like we’re just waiting for trauma and instead i’m showing them how to keep their commas in the right place. how the fuck do either of us navigate that space?
i forget it can be different. a few years ago, a series of roof tiles fell off our building and made aloud scattered popping noise when they met the ground. i remember the strange accidental culture shock: most of my students went quiet and flattened to the floor; i leapt up and & turned off the lights & shoved my desk against the door. there were three kids who hadn’t been raised in america. i remember the look on their faces; shocked and confused, nervously laughing because they hadn’t assumed a threat. the gentle hands of their american friends helping them get down; shushing in a way i can only describe as kind, sympathetic. one of my students whispered you get used to it.
how can i see how they are suffering and then still ask them such an incredibly selfish request: please just write something about love, about joy, about something that reminds you of passion.
i get novels in return. technically, i have a page limit, but i never enforce it. every semester, students are delighted by the prospect. i get essays about being a dog show judge and about the history of the throw rug and about how prismacolor chooses certain paints. about glitter controversies and about their favorite albums and their role models who helped them come out as gay. students came in with visuals and little movies they made. they would go above and beyond just to ask their heroes i have this assignment. will you tell me about what joy means to you? i have records of interviews from writers and tv producers and youtube stars. i hear stories about tracking down the recipe for their grandmother’s soup and making bread with their uncle and learning about dance from other cultures. they put their whole heart into it.
i said: this is just for your freshman english class! you do not have to try this hard! i am just one teacher in a million!
my students looked up to me, coated in the viscera and insincerity of their lives; this harrowing space so slick with their own mortality, their childhoods never awarded to them. they do not have the same promise of future. they have never assumed they would live forever. love is not in an arrow-speared heart for them; it has always been too fleeting to tattoo. if they catch it, they release it back into the wild, horrified by how little territory it has left. they wish it well but do not keep it for long. they have always been aware of the cost of their own body.
and they said: it brings me joy, which means it’s time well spent.
something about that. something about the fact they can find it anyway: i wish i could write each of them my own essay, and it will be full of all the words you’re not supposed to use. ribs and teeth and middle fingers. i wish they related to that, that in their heart were only poems about falling asleep and soft blankets and galaxies. every rainbow peony cliche. i wish i could hold their hand and push the desk in front of the door and say: i got you now. it’s gonna be okay.
if cilantro tastes like soap to some people why is it such an uncommon soap scent? I feel like things that taste like soap should be soap
before soap existed what did the soap gene cavemen say cilantrussy. hang on i have to stop this mid sentence because my phone autocorrected cilantro to cilantrussy which means i have previously typed that word out enough for my phone to think it’s a word and more of a word than cilantro. i have some inward reflection to do.
In general I’m of the opinion that the dice should only be rolled when the results actually matter, but like… sometimes players like to roll just for the sake of rolling. And it’s not something I’m opposed to.
I’ve taken to calling this “rolling for color” to make it transparent to the player that ultimately the roll won’t have a mechanical effect but that it will have an effect on the description. But also it’s one of those things where I usually give the player a choice.
For an example, in a recent game I ran one of the players asked me if she’d need to make a roll for her character to gracefully make it to the bar in a crowded tavern. I told her that it was up to her: she could either choose to narrate how she got to the bar, adding as many twists as she liked into her narration, or she could roll purely for color and to aid in establishing how she did (to this end we used the maneuver table I had adapted from Rolemaster Unified into Lightmaster).
Because, like, while a lot of people are like “don’t roll the dice unless necessary” sometimes players enjoy injecting a bit of randomness into those quiet moments when the mechanics aren’t doing a lot of heavy lifting. But it’s also good to ask players for when they want to roll: if one of your players is unironically enjoying playing Azrael d'Arkness who is too cool and edgy to fail, you don’t try to bring them down a peg by asking them to roll to to rev up their motorcycle, unless the player also agrees that it would be funny to inject the possibility of Azrael humiliating himself into the situation.
at my table we call these “elective rolls” and there’s always a brief “You understand that by choosing to roll when you don’t have to, you’re opening your character up to potential embarrassment, failure, or otherwise ineffectiveness in this moment”
if the answer is yes, then like, go for it, my dude. What’s the harm? if rolling dice more makes the game more fun for a player AND they accept that the outcome might be not favorable, do it.
If you’re ending up in a lot of situations where no dice are being rolled but the players want to roll more dice consider either a) a different game or b) engaging with the dice mechanics more instead of freeform rp.
Elective/colour rolls are often part of a player using the system’s mechanics to tell a joke, recreating the same slapstick that you get when the dice are being unkind.
Also, if the players are feeling like they want to roll dice but don’t want to get into a fight, it might be time to jump into a minigame, which lets players stretch their mechanical/luck pushing expertise in a low stakes context. This is why festivals and fair games feature in my campaigns at least once an arc.
CDC finally fuckin’ recommended the new COVID boosters for everyone in the US. letting my american followers who don’t check the news know because i’ve been turned away for wanting to get an extra booster & now won’t be anymore & it’s Lovely. most americans are not going to get these and are going to grumble about them, which sucks as far as spread goes - but DOES mean u can schedule with ur local pharmacy sooner rather than later. please do so. ur immunocomprised friends and ur own body will thank u.
The name's Gage. I'm just some 28 year old bisexual comic artist (who has a real job outside of art) living within a small-ish Minnesota town.
He/him or she/her.
My current project is an all-ages Solarpunk comedy adventure webcomic called Key to the Future's Fate! Follow Leon Candel as he's brought to the future... and expected to make it a paradise!
![edited xkcd comic with a conversation between two people: "[monsterfucking] is second nature to us [transgenders], so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only [wants to fuck a werewolf] and one or two [vampires]" "and [slimegirls], of course" "of course."](https://64.media.tumblr.com/5374cf0407e13cf025912c17fb248042/72021f22e7ea3338-e4/s500x750/53ce67acee135c96097e248c5b6a7912f09f5940.png)
