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   clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 04:39:49 JST clarity flowers

   I have this really cool idea for a fantasy setting where instead of capturing the wonder and intangible metaphysical truths of human existence through narrative devices, I make it a hollow mimicry of everyday bureaucratic existence. I think it’d be interesting to demonstrate how I have no real hope or faith for humanity to ever escape from its self constructed prison, and that frankly it’s probably childish to imagine anything else. I’m pretty sure nobody has ever had this idea before.

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 04:47:39 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     What if wizard spells had technical debt. What if you bought magic swords at the supermarket. What if the border between life and death looked like the TSA. What if unicorns lived in suburbs. Can you fucking hear yourself? What is wrong with all of you.

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 04:58:33 JST clarity flowers

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     • notplants

     @notplants it is an insult to life itself

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     notplants (notplants@sunbeam.city)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 04:58:35 JST notplants

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     @clarity these ideas sound funny to me. i think one of the open secrets of bureaucratic modernity is that it creates a lot of very funny situations, even if at times agonizing. the second open secret here is that humor is itself an intangible metaphysical truth of human existence, so the snake sort of eats its own tail nonetheless

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 05:01:07 JST clarity flowers

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     I won’t just die on this hill, I will kill on it

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 05:27:58 JST clarity flowers

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     • notplants

     @notplants I actually really like modern-day fantasy when it's not thoughtless. I could point to Scott Pilgrim (or really, any of Brian Lee O'Malley's works), or Earthbound, or that tweet about rats in the subway, or The Secret Knots. Anything that brings wonder into the world instead of treating it as a childish impulse. But when you use the divine spirit of creativity to paint the mcdonald's parking lot as a timeless inevitability I think you're doing the bourgeoisie's job for them

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     notplants (notplants@sunbeam.city)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 05:27:59 JST notplants

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     @clarity ive always appreciated mall rats and found trash beautiful, and often find modernity funny even if not "ideal". but apologies to being sharing this in your thread if this is a space for you to vent. i dont know you and cant necessarily read the sincerity of your tone

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 06:40:50 JST clarity flowers

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     • 🐛

     @apophis it's so normalized!!!

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     🐛 (apophis@brain.worm.pink)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 06:40:51 JST 🐛

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     @clarity if i didn't already follow you and already have a sense of where you're coming from i might not have realized this was sarcasm until the very last sentence 💀
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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 06:46:51 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     • notplants
     • 🐛

     @apophis @notplants "magic as technology" is such an obvious and well-tread metaphor at this point that it's hard not to be trite with it, but yeah I agree it's probably the space with the most potential for anything interesting at all to happen.

     My dungeon crawling game is trying to toe a line where "sorcery" isn't so much "magic technology" but does try to capture how information-as-power transforms relations & ecosystems when not paired with discipline & humility

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     🐛 (apophis@brain.worm.pink)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 06:46:52 JST 🐛

     in reply to

     • notplants
     • 🐛
     @clarity @notplants that said, i can totally see "wizard tech debt" as a premise for all sorts of monstrous messed-up adventure settings... like just an enormous dungeon/tower complex filled with indecipherable crap that barely works and every working has a dozen odd plot points pointing to some mistake someone made countless years ago tantalizingly hinting at some greater terrible whole...
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     🐛 (apophis@brain.worm.pink)'s status on Wednesday, 28-May-2025 06:46:53 JST 🐛

     in reply to

     • notplants
     @clarity @notplants this might, without exaggeration, be the single best use of that quote i've seen
     
     like just the way it lines up with what miyazaki was responding to, but from another end of that great misshapen beast that shits out stories that drag us back *into* the iron prison of violence and forgetfulness of good instead of opening avenues of escape...