So this will be both an after action report and a gameplay question. I have recently almost completed a Guangdong Fujitsu playthrough, and I want to outline the positives and the negatives.
The positives
The economic growth and the competition with Manchuria is the best thing in the entire playthrough. It feels so rewarding spending every bit of effort on creating wonderful products, and seeing that GDP moving up - oh, that felt nice. The products themselves also were a wonderful mechanic, and there was an especially brilliant departure from the usual trope - to get additional quality, you could just spend an increased amount of time and money, and not sacrifice people in the thousands. The weapon testing felt kind of nice, and the instant objective recognition looked amazing, but some of the onjectives were somewhat luck-dependant. I think that the last product, the oil crisis wars one, should get lighter objectives, so it is not as hard to get them all completed in barely half the normal time. The graphic design of Fujitsu is beautiful, it was as if the screen had a couple of neon tubes installed inside. The focus tree for Fujitsu is also very well made, and the laws seem realistic, are impactful and rewarding.
The negatives, or I failed the riots so now I complain
One negative before the riots was the Guangdong control mechanic, allowing only one action of a type to be taken simultaneously felt horribly sluggish.
As stated above, I failed the riots. However, I do believe that at least in some part, the outcome of my actions should have been different. I played as Fujitsu, their whole thing is, besides efficiency, digitalization and digital surveilance. They also reform the police force, which I did. They are a futuristic security state. And they can not deal with the riots easily? The effort of establishing all of the security measures feels unrewarded.
The riots themselves have one mechanic which was my downfall. Since I was doing an "evil" playthrough, I did all the force decisions and reduced the Strength to 0 for both organizations. I also kept than number firmly in place, and slowly pushed the rebels geographically with the control screen. There are 0 people on the streets, order has been restored to all but one district, and yet the investigation fails due to high radicalism. Are all the rioters in prison, but, like, really angry, and refuse to say anything? Allright then, don't talk, but, since you are not in the streets, the riots are over, no?
The options in the investigation are a pure headache. I don't know how to investigate, I'm the chief executive, not a cop, all I got is some flavor events, you are the cop, and I've been bankrolling you for the better half of the playthrough, go do what gets results!
I did about five dismantlement attempts and then some with save loading, as the situation was getting kind of desperate. So either I just missed some of the right choices, which, in my opinion, makes it too random, or I should have negotiated, which, in my opinion, breaks the character of Ibuka. And it's not like he's doomed to fail story-wise, at this point he spent a decade building a security state, he is by far the most economically successful member of the sphere considering growth, half of the world's administrative capacity stems from his computers, but oh no, Zhdanov coctail go splash. Did his fancy surveilance gaming setup overheat from all of the fires?
Conclusion
Despite everything, Guangdong is a wonderful country to play as, if for some reason you've been putting it off for a month like me, do a playthrough, it's fun, but oh my god, I'll need 3 Sablin runs to clear the memories of the flavor events.
I also ask a question, in case I return to that unfinished playthrough. So how do you beat the riots? Don't say stuff like "figure it out", trust me, I've tried. I've spent two evenings on the bloody riots alone!
Thank you for your time.

I never understood this. This actually happened to me on occasion when I used to be picked on at school. I fought back and I got detention and got scolded and lectured about it how beating up a bully is wrong and they don’t deserve violence. What do you think of this? Have you ever been bullied before at school fought back got detention and the bully got away with it. What kind of lesson is this supposed to teach us?

I see it coming every game, but I just don't know how to beat it. 30 man at arms and like 2 rams push and there's just nothing I can do about it. Like, don't even need to scout it, you see it coming from the loading screen, thats all HRE does in my gold elo lol.
But I just have no clue what to do vs these man at arms, since they literally have no counter available in feudal. They are just so incredibly tanky, you cannot kill them in time. And because of aachen its seemingly impossible to out-eco them while staying in feudal too.
I play abassid, ottoman and rarely china

I play a lot of CPU heavy games (X4, Paradox games, iRacing) all of which seem mostly dependent on single core speed.
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Intel typically beats AMD with single core from what I've seen, so I was leaning towards the 13700k. But with the x3D I hear a lot of hype for it, but also a "do games even know how to use said tech" so I'm not sure.
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I also know 7800x3d mobo would possibly see an upgrade, intel would not. But so far i've always had to upgrade mobo every cpu upgrade.
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Currently on 3900x. Need a mobo either way.

This is probably going to be a fruitless question but I’ll ask anyway. Today I was listening to the solstice OST and I heard some of the songs that aren’t in the game, and they’re interesting and I think they would have added more variety to in game music (not like it really needs more but it would’ve been cool). I especially like “The Simulation” because of how different it is from the original game OST and the other songs in solstice OST, mixing in a sounds and beats that greatly vary from the other songs. I also like “The Author” which I don’t think I’ve heard (but I’m not completely sure). Sorry, now to my question, does any one know why these songs weren’t included in the game? Did Nightmargin ever specify why/ was there ever any public reason for it?

Zombie Defense

Genre: Tower Defense
Players: 1
.
Review:
Zombie Defense is a Tower Defense game released on Wii U in 2015 and ported to PC in 2016. As you might imagine, this game has you fighting off incoming hordes of zombies, with this game having you doing so by managing a small squad of characters you can command to go specific defense points.
Okay, let’s get this out of the way first - Zombie Defense is an ugly game. Simple, poorly-detailed character models, blurry resolutions, tons of aliasing. Add to this an insultingly formulaic story, and dramatic music that I suppose fits the theme, but isn’t memorable, and is hard to take seriously with how terrible the game looks.
In addition, the controls here are not exactly idea. This game was clearly made with just the touchscreen in mind, and as a result it under-utilizes the traditional gamepad controls when those could be used for common functions that are instead mapped to buttons on the touchscreen, unnecessarily taking up space on the screen.
Yet despite the poor design choices and amateurish presentation, Zombie Defense kinda’ works. There are actually some clever systems at play here, the first being that unlike most Tower Defense games, you control people who can move at your command, meaning that you can shift them around as the situation calls for it, or to beat a hasty retreat if need be. However, the flipside of that is that you often will have to have your characters move, as different parts of the battlefield become more or less saturated with zombies.
The other element that really keeps things interesting here is this game’s massive unlock tree, where players can spend money earned in missions to increase their regiment size, gain access to more varied troops, get better weaponry, get money bonuses, and so on. There is an absolute not of upgrades to choose from, meaning that players who stick with this game can look forward to a good amount of time powering up their own personal army.
I really wish these great game mechanics had found their way into a Tower Defense game that didn’t look like poop smeared on the side of a wall, and that better use had been made of controls other than the touchscreen. However, if you can look past these flaws, I think you’ll find Zombie Defense to be an excellent entry in the Tower Defense genre.
tl;dr – Zombie Defense is, as you might imagine, a Tower Defense games where players defend against hordes of incoming zombies. The graphics are terrible and the controls leave something to be desired, but there are some clever gameplay ideas at work here, with a really meaty skill tree of unlockables. If you can look past this game’s flaws, I think you’ll find a lot of rewarding gameplay here.

Grade: B-

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I
Despair
The air was thick with the stench of sweat and fear as the young boy huddled in the corner of his dark room, his bony knees pulled up to his chest. He knew nothing but the brutal hands of his master and the endless torment that consumed nearly his every waking moment. The boy's mind was a battlefield, torn between the desire for freedom and the crushing weight of hopelessness.
The boy's only glimmer of light in his dismal existence was a woman who looked after him. She was kind, with eyes that shone with empathy and a heart that overflowed with compassion. Though she was a fellow slave, she had taken the boy under her wing and treated him as her own. Without her the boy surely would be dead.
Despite the constant fear of punishment and retribution, the woman would often sneak the boy scraps of food and offer him words of encouragement. Her touch was gentle, her voice soothing, and in her presence the boy felt a sense of safety and comfort. The boy thought of her as his mother.
The boy's world was about to shatter into a million pieces. His master had decided that the boy was of no use to him and had sold him off to be a foot soldier as they were for high demand since the kingdom was in constant state of war. Despite his fear and desperation, the boy was forced to leave the only place he had ever known behind and face an uncertain future.
The only reason he had been allowed to stay this long was because of his mother's threats to harm herself if the master got rid of the boy. The master was quite fond of her because of her looks but now the master's patience wore thin and, even she couldn't save him from this fate.
Despite his fears, the boy had hope. He knew that his mother cared for him. Though he was no soldier, he was determined to make something of his existence and gain enough influence to free his mother.
The boy felt a lump form in his throat as he was hauled away in a cage full of other poor souls, his eyes darting around nervously as he tried to make sense of what was happening. Fear pulsed through his veins, the unknown future ahead of him seeming like a gaping mouth ready to swallow him whole.
But even as his heart raced with fear, there was also a small spark of excitement within him. For the first time in his life, he was free from his master's grasp, free to experience the world beyond the small corner he had been confined to for so long.
As the cage rattled and jolted along the bumpy road, the boy's thoughts turned to his former master, and a seething rage bubbled up inside him. He hated the man with every fiber of his being, for the way he had treated him and his mother.
The memories of a never-ending stream of abuse and cruelty that had been heaped upon him flooded his mind. He remembered the beatings, the starvation, the endless days of toil without rest. He remembered the way his master had used his mother.
The boy's hatred burned like a hot flame, fueled by the injustice he had suffered at the hands of his master. He wanted revenge, to see the man who had made his life a living hell suffer as he had suffered.
II
Lost and Found
The boy slowly opened his eyes, his vision blurry and his head throbbing. He blinked a few times, trying to clear the haze from his mind, and looked around in confusion.
He was no longer in the cramped cage that had carried him for days, but instead in a large tent, surrounded by unfamiliar faces. The smell of smoke and sweat filled the air, and the sound of numerous voices filled his ears.
The boy layed there, still a bit dazed, when an older man with an ear to ear smile walked into the tent. The man was dressed in tattered clothes, and his hair was wild and unkempt but there was a twinkle in his eye.

• Well, well, well. Looks like you're new here. The old man said, his voice rough but friendly.
  
• What's your name, boy?
  

The boy hesitated for a moment before answering. He didn’t have a name and had just been called boy.

• I... I don’t have a name.

The old man's smile faltered for a moment. He looked at the boy with a mix of sympathy and sadness.

• I see... That is not uncommon for young slaves. Most of us here are poor beggars with no other place to go for food or former slaves.

After a long awkward pause the old man’s smile returned to his face and he continued.

• Anyway, I’m Otis. Are you hungry boy?

The boy nodded timidly and Otis began to lead him outside the tent. There were many other tents and countless men outside. They all seemed either old, young or in poor health.
After a bit of walking they arrived at a wagon that was full of bread and water barrels. Beside it stood two men that were handing out bread and water. They were dressed in armor and had long swords at their belts.
There was a long line to the wagon that they too joined. It felt like they had stood in the line for ions before it was their turn. The soldiers handed him a piece of bread and water but looked almost disgusted that they had to be there.
The boy followed Otis and they sat by one of the many campfires. There was a crowd of other people sitting there eating and bantering.

• If you are fast you have enough time to go through the waiting line twice and get two pieces of bread. A scrawny looking man explained cheerfully to a bunch of other men.
  
• I’m gonna slay the enemy general and become rich and get good food and a bunch of women. Boasted one young adult eagerly to other even younger teens.
  

However, the majority of the men were sitting quietly eating their bread with empty looks in their eyes. Many of them had bandages or were missing body parts.
The bread was low quality but the boy was so hungry it tasted great and he finished it before he even realized it. Otis hadn’t touched his bread yet and noticed how the boy had finished his.

• Here. Otis said while handing him his bread.

The boy was speechless and just took the bread and it disappeared as fast as the first one. Otis chuckled quietly and smiled faintly with a distant look in his eyes.

• Well boy, I can’t call you boy forever so you need a name. Otis said after a brief pause.

The boy looked flustered so Otis decided to continue.

• I had a son named Ali. How does that sound?

The boy's face turned slightly brighter and he nodded.

• Ali it is then. Otis declared.

The sun was setting already and Ali went to the tent with the help of Otis. Despite being exhausted Ali felt a great amount of sadness. He was missing his mother and how warm and safe he felt beside her. Tears streamed down his face as he was overwhelmed by the emotions.
When Ali woke up he noticed that Otis was already awake and sitting on the ground next to him. They went to get food at the same place as the previous day and got the same piece of bread.

• You get the same miserable piece of bread three times a day. Otis explained cheerfully.
  
• Anyway we could be ordered to go to battle anytime so listen up.
  

Otis' tone had turned a bit more serious and he started explaining what Ali should do in different situations.

• We are the most low quality soldiers in the field and are used as fodder that is replaceable by other poor people. There will likely be similar soldiers at the other side but there will also be real soldiers who have armor and have training and experience. Try to stay behind other people at all times. If there is cavalry charging towards us, hide below bodies so you don't get trampled as badly. If there is arrow rain also hide below bodies if possible or squat to make yourself smaller. We get shields or armor. We only get weapons that are usually low quality. You should try to find a better weapon on the battlefield if you get the chance. Also if you have to face men with full plate armor you should aim for armpits, back of the knees or the visor.

Ali felt overwhelmed and scared.

And I'm not talking about the fact that he lost or anything. Anybody with a decently sized brain should know that Shanks wouldn't end up losing this battle! People who thought that Kid would end up as the winner of a battle against Shanks, one of the most hyped, oldest, and powerful characters in One Piece, probably read a completely story altogether and/or have no understanding about basic story telling!
What I do find worthy of critique and complain is HOW Kid ended up getting defeated. Kid haters might disagree with me here, but Kid is not some idiot or weakling who does something THAT stupid! Otherwise he wouldn't just have sneaked into Big Mom's territory, steal a copy of her Poneglyph, and injure one of her Commanders. If what the last couple chapters is indeed true, he would have marched into her palace and picked a fight with Big Mom and all her children instead. Kid might be hotheaded and foul-mouthed but he ain't stupid.
Furthermore, this most recent encounter of him with Shanks isn't exactly his first tango with an Emperor! Leaving his battle against Big Mom with Law aside, he already butted heads with Shanks (or rather his crew) and fought against Kaidou (twice!). The fights against Kaidou are particularly noteworthy since it showed him that he needed to work with others if he wanted to take them down. For crying out loud, he and Law came to the conclusion that they had to work together if they want to beat Big Mom!
So, having him do something so stupid as attacking Shanks and all/most of his allies all on his own, without any kind of plan, feels kinda wrong and against what had been established so far. Or that's at least what I thought about this situation. Maybe I'm the one who read the story wrong the entire time and Kid is nothing more than a simple minded brute afterall.
But even so, the whole point where Dorry and Broggy made fun of the Kid Pirates for being unprepared about getting met with resistance if they attack someone, SOMETHING THAT WAS TALKED ABOUT THE LAST TIME IN CHAPTER 1, just feels... wrong. Like, I hope I'm not the only one who thinks that this doesn't really fit ANY kind of pirate crew in the New World which had crossed paths with three Emperors so far! A random mountain bandit on a single island in the East Blue? Most definitely! A guy/crew who fought against several foes all over the New World? Not so much!
If anything, it made the Kid Pirates look like a pair of bullies that has done nothing than fought against unarmed victims so far, despite them continuously going toe-to-toe with other strong pirate crews. If that was Oda's intention all along, then I guess that's okay... In that case however, I'm left wondering why Oda wanted to have Kid as Luffy’s rival in the first place! Who would want a story where a bully with barely any redeeming qualities is depicted as a somewhat/in-world rival and equal to the main character?
If this chapter was simply meant to hype Shanks, then I'm sure that Oda could have done it in much more interesting and natural ways than just to one-shot Kid. Again, nobody would have thought that Kid would win this battle, but I'd say that some people (myself included) would have hoped for a bit more from Kid. As it stands, having Kid be able to take Kaidou's and Big Mom's attacks but getting one-shot by Shanks' creates this sorta-weird imbalance. Like, are Kaidou and Big Mom just that much weaker than Shanks? If so, why didn't Shanks outright defeat Kaidou way back before he appeared in Marineford?
It feels more like Oda didn't know how to further work with Kid/he wrote himself in a corner where characters like Law became more important and popular than him, despite him being (seemingly) planned by Oda beforehand. I'm inclined to think and say that Oda just didn't want to work with him anymore and used him as a way to hype up Shanks some more.
As it stands, I'm just kinda... disappointed, I guess. It felt somewhat cheap and unlike anything that seemed to have been set up with Kid so far. It might be a fool's hope, but I still wish that Kid will do something more impactful then... whatever the events in the last chapters were supposed to accomplish.

One of the most famous CS:GO teams now is G2. they are like the new stars of CS:GO gaming. Let's see how they started. G2 is a European eSports organization based in Berlin, Germany. The games are matched in League of Legends, Valorant, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Rocket League, Rainbow Six Siege, and iRacing. The organization was founded in Spain on February 24, 2014, by Gamers2 League of Legends player Carlos "Ocelote" Rodríguez Santiago and investor Jens Hilgers. On October 15, 2015, the organization was renamed G2 Esports. G2 Esports is the top 3 esports team of 2022 according to HLTV. Let's look at their biggest achievements. • G2 Esports took part in 475 tournaments in various eSports disciplines. • The record audience for the entire existence of G2 Esports - 3,985,780 Peak viewers (2019 World Championship). • The net worth of G2 Esports is $13,093,606 in tournament prize money. Top 3 tournaments with G2 Esports participation: • 2016 World Championship • 2017 World Championship • Six Invitational 2023 On December 18, 2022, G2 Esports won the BLAST Premier World Final 2022 and earned $500,000. In the final, the team beat Team Liquid with a score of 2:0. G2 Esports has won a major LAN tournament for the first time since 2017. On February 12, 2023, the team won the first tier-1 tournament of the year - IEM Katowice 2023. In the final, the team beat Heroic with a score of 3:1. The most valuable player of the HLTV tournament was recognized as Nemanja "huNter-" Kovac.

Over from the Patreon. If you haven't read Cass' Aven Cycle, it's really good stuff!
Today we're chatting with Cass Morris, author of the Aven Cycle, a historical fantasy set in an alternate Rome, and co-host of the podcast Worldbuilding for Masochists, an award-nominated podcast discussing the intricacies of worldbuilding in SFF. This means Cass is something of an expert on worldbuilding complexity in fantasy books, which is what I want to talk about today. SFF readers have a particular love of immersing ourselves in richly detailed worlds we can imagine ourselves in viscerally, but let's talk about how writers can actually bring that complexity of detail into focus without totally overwhelming readers.
So to start, I want to talk about political systems, because I love how you managed to make the deep sense of complexity on that front accessible. Ancient Rome: Not an uncomplicated governmental system! And that's before you introduce fantastical elements. People already have trouble understanding how our own governments work, so how do you teach the reader enough that you can play with that complexity for plot intrigue? How do you convey the sense of complexity so the reader understands it without totally bogging down the pacing with exposition?
CASS: Well, one big thing that helps is absolutely the editing process! I'm prone to going into far too much detail on the first try. Multiple pages of too much detail. An entire swamp's worth of getting bogged down. Laying out all the complexities helps me explain them to myself, but it's far more than a reader needs. After the first draft, I could carve out what was totally unnecessary, then simplify the rest enough to be comprehensible, just as, say, The West Wing simplifies the machinations of the White House and Congress without losing what's dramatically interesting about them.
Then, as with so many worldbuilding elements, I think you have to connect political worldbuilding to what a character needs and what's obstructing them. For example: Sempronius Tarren needs to win a certain election to get himself the right provincial posting to set up his longer-term goals. In seeing him make that plan, the reader learns a little about the hierarchy of offices and the powers endowed to each—not a full constitution's worth of details, but enough to understand why the office is desirable and valuable to this character in this moment. Then, the obstruction: His philosophical opponents don't want him gaining what they consider dangerous levels of power, so they throw legal challenges in his way, the same way the US Congress uses things like filibusters. Showing Sempronius' frustration at the block, followed by his own countermove to get around it, feeds the reader more information about how the system works, but through the more engaging lens of his thoughts and emotions.
CASEY: Ha, the existence of editing is a great point. I've done this the opposite way as well—drafted the bones of the story and then filled in later once I knew what kind of detail was called for. But I think the key that you bring up here is that you're focusing on what is relevant to the point-of-view character. They—and we, as the authors—might know and be familiar with all kinds of political nuances the reader isn't, but that doesn't mean you have to teach them all to the reader!
This can get tricky, because deep in the character POV they might notice all those signals, but the ones the reader needs are the ones that are directly relevant to the POV character's goal and its attending conflict. And moreover, it needs to be a specific goal, not something nebulous like, "I want to attain more power." You have a character who wants to accomplish something specific (e.g. win an election), and give them a limited number of people/obstructions who are the actual roadblocks—possibly not the person you'd expect to have the power to stop them, to indicate more nuance in a system, or you can mention in summary other contributing factors that are already in hand, things like that. But limiting the scope helps focus on a few areas to then flesh out in depth, which in turn creates the impression of more depth in general.
It's sort of counterintuitive, but in a way you have room to give more detail with fewer details. And I love how your approach bakes the exposition into the character's agency as they navigate their response to obstructions, because that is so helpful with pacing, too.
DJANGO: A good edit does indeed always help a lot!
For me the biggest barrier to depicting a complex government realistically is the sheer number of people involved. In any government of reasonable size there are hundreds, if not thousands, of potential decision-makers who might have impact on a plot. In a Roman context, beyond the actual elected officials (and there are plenty of those) you have all the other members of important families who didn'tget elected, or are planning to get elected next year, or who lend money to the candidates, or what have you. Thinking about the current US government, the number of characters I personally would recognize (as a more-or-less informed news reader) is both far less than the number who really matter and far morethen we can expect an average novel reader to keep track of.
There are a few techniques that have helped me in the past. The first is just an acceptable break from reality—power in novels tends to be way more centralized than it would "realistically" be. This is true even in very autocratic societies! To go back to my favorite example, in A Game of Thrones the number of major characters involved in the government is probably less than 20—the king, his family, the small council, and the seven Lords Paramount (Stark, Tully, Tyrell, and so on). This is enough that the book has a reputation for complexity and having a lot of characters, but compared to a real government of the type it depicts is probably an order of magnitude too low. GRRM wisely concentrates a lot of functions into personal rule because it works better dramatically for Mace Tyrell or Tywin Lannister to attend to stuff personally than having a hundred ministers and vassals all the time. (It's not a government, but in The Shadow Campaigns the army that the main characters are part of is under-officered in comparison to its historical counterparts—extremely so by British standards!—exactly because this means fewer named characters for everyone to keep track of.)
The other useful trick is to assign representatives—people who can stand in for a large bunch of similar people that we keep coming back to. If you need to write "someone convinces the members of Parliament to vote yes on something," and it doesn't work for there to be some single person who gets to make that choice, you can show the characters meeting with a small number of MPs, say three, and coming back to them several times. With the proper framing as a kind of montage, the reader understands that these are examples and extrapolates. This helps you depict the kind of thing that goes on in the government, which can be just as important as its formal structure. (For example, are you getting the MPs on-side by threats from the party whip, promises of future political favors, or payoffs and patronage?) Joe Abercrombie is particularly good at this, for example in his depiction of the Open Council in Before They Are Hanged.
CASS: Yeah, trimming down the number of people involved is definitely a big help. That's another place where I usually have far too many functionaries and side characters on the first go, then end up consolidating them in following drafts. You can also do a lot just depicting the literal halls of power—how full the building is, how many people are moving around, even the architecture itself can tell the reader a lot about the scale of the governing apparatus, in just a few words of description.
Trimming down the steps of a process also helps. If you look at something like how a bill becomes a law in the United States, it's a lot more complex than Schoolhouse Rock led us to believe! It's not just: 1. Propose Law; 2. Committee Debate; 3: Full Chamber Debate; 4: Vote; 5: Repeat in Other Chamber; 6: President Signs. There are many layers of hearings and markups and financial appropriations, and it's all recursive, because you might have to go through that several times! A little of that may prove interesting, if you can hang an exciting character moment on it or show a really neat procedural trick, but going through the full process will be torture for anyone but the wonkiest of policy wonks.
The Aven Cycle is a fantasy with a strong historical analogue, and I know you have a lot of experience with historical research, between your current dramaturgical work for Camp Halfblood and your formal academic training. So talk to me about how you use history to inform your worldbuilding without restricting your fictional playground with so much research the story becomes didactic. How do you choose what to focus on, and what to leave out? Since women are front and center in these books, I'd love to hear in particular how you focused their stories with a sense of historicity, and how much you could take or chose to invent based on your research.
CASS: I have always been hugely interested in social history: how people live their lives in a given place and time. Sometimes it's strikingly similar to how we experience life today, and sometimes it's so alien—and the same piece of history can be an example of both! I'm fascinated by all the pressure points a society faces and how we create both problems and solutions out of our dominant paradigms. Social history can be hard to uncover, though, because so many of our literary primary sources were composed by wealthy free men, which leaves out most of society. We generally see everyone else through the biased lens of those guys at the top of the heap—at least in what we think of as traditional source material. So, I like exploring less traditional sources.
In the early modern world of my academic training, we do have more surviving written work in the form of letters and journals, but we can also look to things like ecclesiastical records. I promise that's more fascinating than it sounds! Reading up on 17th century slander trials is wild, for example, because those record the exact words that people were using to insult each other—which in turn tells us a lot about what they considered virtuous and what was shameful. Or there's Henslowe's Diary, which gets into granular detail about the income and expenses of a theatre in the 1590s and 1600s.
In the ancient world, archaeology provides more information than words do. The layout of their houses, their furniture, their tools, their kitchen utensils, all of it shows us how people lived. Some of my favorite sources are funerary monuments. Thousands and thousands of these survive, and they document the lives of regular people. The majority, in fact, belong to soldiers or freedmen and their families. They used them to boast of what they'd made of themselves, proud that their children had been born free, proud of the businesses they built. The soldiers spoke about where they'd fought and what awards they won. Some of the most heartbreaking were set up by parents mourning for young children (putting paid to the myth that people didn't get attached to their kids because of high rates of child mortality). Each one is a declaration of the self in defiance of the oblivion of eternity, and I just find that so beautiful.
That's all a long way of saying: I look for the history that shows me people. Those are the details that I want to carry into the text: what they care about, what they value, and the material culture that attends those more abstract concepts. That's the history that ties to character, rather than just being an info-dump.
Even with all that archaeological information, though, we're still stuck with a dearth of information, particularly when it comes to the lives of women and other marginalized groups. So I've had to train myself to look at the absences, the gaps in the record, and try to fill them in, and to look at the sources written by men, then subtract out the biases those men held in order to get to something closer to truth.
It's like looking at the shadow of a tiger. It might give you an idea of the tiger's shape, but only from a particular angle. It may or may not tell you how big a tiger is. It won't tell you that a tiger has stripes, what a tiger sounds like, or what it eats. Examining the lives of marginalized groups in history is often trying to know them by their shadows.
What's clear, though, is that women exerted a lot of power "off-screen" in the ancient world. We have some gorgeous examples: Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, held up as a paragon of virtue; much-married Fulvia, who ran street gangs, had a feud with Cicero, and waged war against Octavius Caesar; Agrippina Major, popular heroine who gave an emperor so much grief that he had her assassinated; her daughter Agrippina Minor, mother of Nero, whose autobiography is the lost text I'd most like to see miraculously rediscovered. I could go on and on—but I borrowed a lot from all of them when crafting the women of Aven. They were smart and resourceful despite the confines of their society, and whether they played within the boundaries or dared to transgress, they made an impact.
DJANGO: For me this is all about using history to inform my worldbuilding, rather than define it.
I like to think of using history as a case study, an example, rather than a blueprint to be literally followed. If you have a fantasy situation—a type of warfare, an environment, a resource distribution—history provides you with examples of how real people adapted to it, made use of it, and generally applied their ingenuity. People, by and large, don't do obviously stupid things (at least not for very long) and so generally the fact that a society was set up in such-and-such a way and lasted for hundreds of years means that it worked pretty well! (In our modern times of plenty, this can be hard to comprehend; for most of human history, "everyone not dying of starvation" was a great accomplishment requiring constant, unrelenting work.)
This is not to say, of course, that it had to be that way, or that any other way is "unrealistic." The key is to use the historical analogy to understand the kinds of thingsthat were challenges for those people. If they live in, say, a desert, they will have adapted to it in every way: dress, food, shelter, etc. When you read about how they lived, the important thing isn't to copy it exactly, but to make sure that your fantasy people have answers to the same challenges—this is what gives the book verisimilitude!
What I generally find is that no amount of me sitting down and reasoning out the problems people face, a priori, goes even a fraction of the way toward actually understanding those problems; history inevitably throws up fixes that people invented for problems I would never have even considered. (In late medieval France, knife-sharpeners carried circular whetstones—we're talking big, 50 pound stones—on their backs as they went from village to village. The rest of their setup could be constructed from local wood, but big stones of sufficient hardness were very hard to find, and drilling a hole through the middle for the axle was a capital investment!) Lifting these little vignettes for my fantasy society gives it that feel of realism I crave, while still leaving sufficient room to change the aspects of the past that I'm not eager to replicate.
CASS: What gets really fun there is, if you are using a specific historical inspiration but want to make really significant changes, figuring out what happens when you flick the domino. I'm working on a new project now that's a secondworld fantasy instead of an alternate version of our world, but it's inspired by early modern London and the vibe of Shakespeare's theatres. I'm working from that base because I want that aesthetic—but I also want this society to have gender equity, I want them to be accepting of queer identities, I want them to be polytheistic, and the government is more like Venice than England. Those are some really big changes from London in 1600, even before adding magic to the equation!
So then I get to figure out what else in society those things touch: clothing, industry, family structure, bureaucratic structure, and so forth. How would these people, with their worldview, find similar or different answers to problems than the historical examples I'm inspired by? This is why I love worldbuilding, because I find that such a fun game. There are so many possible answers, and I tinker until I find the ones that best fit the story I want to tell.
CASEY: Oh, funerary monuments is a great tip. There's a newsletter called Ælfgif-who? on biographies of early medieval English women, and it's fascinating to see what the author can construct from a combination of records and artifacts and the biases involved, what's said and what's conspicuously not said, what she can guess versus what there's hard evidence for. As a fantasist, I love the possibility space those gaps create that I can fill in.
As Django points out, people have been problem-solving throughout history, and that's not limited to wealthy men. If the records don't talk about what women were doing, it doesn't mean they were sitting on their laurels all day or just accepting whatever men figured out, and you can often get a sense for the space they occupied in the gaps—and if you can't, those gaps can give you ideas for what space they couldoccupy—in history, or in a story.
I think it's also worth noting that historical research can give you a sense of what kinds of social systems go together. I remember reading a fantasy book with a setting inspired by Japan that had all these features that have existed in Japanese history but not at the same time. So it was this mess of things that didn't make any sense together, because the author hadn't paid attention to the historical context.
I don't write historical analogue settings, but even for secondary world fantasy I find it useful to pay attention to what features can work together, and that's especially important once you start changing aspects to suit your story. A society with cell phones is not going to work the same way as one with post. A society where most people can't read won't work the same either! And this matters because it determines what kind of plots you can write, but it's also not super efficient to consider every aspect of the worldbuilding. Like, in a given story I may not need to know how laundry works, or the sewers, or what toys children are playing with. (Sometimes, sure! But not every time.)
But I probably need to know what people are wearing so I can describe them, so it matters what kind of clothing their technology could make and what it costs. I need to know how they communicate with each other, because they're going to do that in pretty much any story.
So I start with a character and plot concept and work backward to build the world around what the story requires them to do, and I do it in this order because otherwise I am exactly the person who will get lost in a worldbuilding rabbit hole at the expense of actually writing the story. But once I start figuring out some of the tentpoles like, This person's unique education makes them critical to the plot (why do they have that education? what education is available to other people?), or more generally, Our heroes will not be able to call for help because the message won't arrive in time (how far does the message need to travel, and how long will it take, and how long to get a response?), that starts to tell you the kinds of things that will be important to put together to make a world that feels internally consistent and enablesyou to tell your story.
If your heroine is rebelling against an arranged marriage, it's worth asking how common arranged marriages are and why and for whom. Like, the whole culture of debutantes in regency England emerged out of economic changes! Social institutions are intertwined, you can't just treat them as piecemeal. But if you do it right, the research gives you more things to play with that inform your characters' histories and choices rather than restricting you based on what "really" happened. Then it's just a matter of focusing on the pieces that actually matter to the story you're actually telling or enhance it in some way.
Lastly, I would be remiss in talking to you specifically about focusing an audience without asking how you use rhetoric to do that very thing (you can find Cass' deep dive on rhetoric in Hamilton, backed by Lin Manuel Miranda himself, on her Patreon). A common piece of writing advice is to never actually write the impossibly dramatic speech in fiction, because it will never be as impressive to readers, and instead focus on the characters' reaction or experience. Do you agree? And are there particular rhetorical devices you like to use to help focus readers' attention on what you want them to notice, whether it's a part of an argument in dialogue or in conveying information in the narrative?
CASS: Oh, you've done a dangerous thing, opening the door of rhetoric for me!
I love rhetoric so much. It's gotten a bad reputation in modern parlance, since most people only ever hear the word in a negative context—political rhetoric, violent rhetoric, and so forth. But rhetoric is nothing more and nothing less than structuring your words to achieve a desired effect. It's deeply woven into everything writers do, whether or not you're the kind of ultra-nerd who memorizes the Greek names for a few hundred devices. I think some of the best writers (like Shakespeare and LMM) do it in part instinctively, because they have such a good ear for how people speak and for the cadence of language, but it's also a skill that you can hone and train.
Rhetoric serves many purposes, and a lot of it is about crafting a character's voice, both in dialogue and in their POV narration. It lends a lot of texture to the story, and it's something I find particularly useful in crafting multi-POV books. Subtle shifts in how characters use language can help center a reader within each individual POV.
In dialogue, I think about vocal quirks that are marks of character and tell you something about the speaker, then I use rhetoric to craft the effect. Who's prone to using more words than necessary, either because they like hearing themselves talk or because they're babbling (devices like pleonasm and accumulatio)? Who likes intricate descriptions (enargia), and who's a champion of deadpan understatement (litotes)? Who, in a state of excitement or eagerness, asks too many questions without waiting for an answer (pysma)? Who's so pompous or instructive that they answer their own questions (anythypophora)? Not that rhetoric is the only tool for playing with these things, of course, but it's the frame I personally like best.
It gets particularly fun when I get to write political arguments, because those speakers are conscious of their own devices to the point of weaponizing them. They'll ask lots of what we call rhetorical questions (erotema), where there's an obvious answer that they're looking for; they'll repeat their ideas in sets of three (tricolon), because that helps the audience to remember them; they'll seize on an important word their opponent used and twist it around some other way (asteismus). They're deliberately showing off, and following the minutiae of the argument often isn't as important for the reader as understanding that they're tweaking each other and trying to one-up each other. The rhetoric lets me communicate those character dynamics in fun ways—similar to the "Cabinet Battle" scenes in Hamilton!
Writers have rhetorical tics, too, which can sometimes become a vice, if you're not aware of them, but which are also part of each author's unique voice. I'm particularly prone to a certain combo of devices: zeugma plus anaphora/isocolon. Zeugma is when two or more words, phrases, or clauses are dependent upon the same other word (usually the main verb of a sentence), as in "I love you truly, madly, deeply." All three adverbs hang on the same main verb. Anaphora is repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, and isocolon is parallel structure. "I came, I saw, I conquered" is an example of both: the repeated "I" at the beginning and the structure of "I + [past tense verb]".
I then sometimes layer that combo with auxesis, a series of clauses or phrases that gradually ascend in importance. You make a list, and the most important thing is last. That's the traditional definition, at least, but I had a professor who argued that auxesis can also work in the opposite direction, where your series diminishes rather than growing, and I do think that can be equally impressive, especially when you want to narrow a reader's or listener's focus. So, the zeugma-anaphora/isocolon-auxesis combo move gives me the opportunity to show a character becoming more intense or more pointed as they're working their way through a thought. If that ends up being shaped like self-correction, then it's also epanorthosis. I recognize that I'm nerding hard at this point! But this is what I find so fun about rhetoric: the devices don't operate in isolation, but layer and intertwine to craft specific moments and that desired effect on the reader.
As to writing the Impossibly Dramatic Speech—I don't think it is impossible, but I do think it's something to use cautiously. You have to pick your moment, for one thing, and it's not always the moment you might think. Not all magnificent speeches are Henry V bucking up his followers on the eve of Agincourt. Sometimes, the magnificent speech is a lover pleading to be heard, a con artist deceiving a mark, a sister quietly giving advice. (See? I told you I'm prone to the zeugma-anaphora/isocolon-auxesis combo!)
It's easier to get away with the big speech on stage or film, because there, the actor is an essential component of the equation. On the page of a novel, the writing itself has a heavier load to carry. So I think you can get away with presenting a well-crafted Impossibly Dramatic Speech in a well-chosen moment, but not all in one block. Interposing the speaker's words with other elements helps to break it up and remind the reader why the speech matters. Maybe you cut away to show the audience's reactions; maybe you cut inside the speaker's head to show them nerving themselves up for it, or debating what to say next, or consciously choosing where they pause.
And here I'll throw another device at you: within a speech, choosing to pause is called aposiopesis. Mark Antony does it at the end of the first bit of his "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech, when he says he's been overcome with emotion, "My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it come back to me." Practically speaking, that gives the actor a break so they don't have to do 140 lines all at once, but it also gives the plebeians a chance to speak and the audience a chance to witness how Antony's words are having an effect. In a novel, a writer can effectively use aposiopesis in another way, breaking the speech up with descriptive elements, which helps to ground the lofty rhetoric back in the reality of the world and the immediacy of the moment.
CASEY: Rhetoric gives us so many tools to play with! Thank you for all those examples. I think it's worth highlighting your point that writers don't have to know what specific rhetorical devices are called to be able to employ them effectively. Adjusting sentence structure and word choice to match character or moment or the rhythm of the plot is doing exactly this work, paying close attention to howyour words are working.
Strategic repetition is a favorite of mine. I love repeating a structure multiple times in a row, particularly with paragraph breaks, because then the white space and alignment helps emphasize what I'm doing. That's something you can't do the same way in other mediums! I also love repeating a line a different character said and twisting its meaning in later dialogue—you have to in some way make sure the reader recognizes the reference, but there are lots of ways to do that.
With novels, we can't rely on visible reactions from the audience or an actor's delivery, but we can manage pacing with punctuation, with narration interspersed or removed. I also love doing the equivalent of an anime peanut gallery ("Did she do it?" "Yes, the attack landed!" "But look at her—now she's almost out of power; she only has one more shot. Will she last another round?") as a way to make sure the reader notices the undercurrents and how they're changing the stakes. And that works just as well in fraught conversations as fight scenes.
This can be especially important in scenes like political debates that are doing heavy interplay of character dynamics, but depending on the scene's goals, sometimes you can do this with telling, too, rather than showing—in The Hands of the Emperor,there's an anecdote about a character capping a joke perfectly; we never learn the joke or the reply, but the content of the words isn't what matters in this case as much as the context, that these characters having just met are able to match each other with no regard to the impropriety. That said, if we're instead in a romance where a plot beat hinges on one main character changing the other's mind, in almost all cases we're going to need that whole conversation to track the minute character shifts that drive romances at their core—and you can give those conversations extra impact by grounding them in the specific words they've said to and thought about each other before.
DJANGO: Rhetoric is an area where I don't have much training, I have to say, so I'll be the one who goes for "don't actually write the speech out." =) I do a fair bit of this in The Shadow Campaigns, in particular for Danton's magically-effective speeches in The Shadow Throne, which obviously aren't going to be replicated in text. In addition to the problems of being able to actually write a good speech—as Cass demonstrates, there's a lot more going on there then you might think!—it can also be hard to replicate the effect on an in-universe audience.
First of all, while the people in the book are hearing something delivered live, the readers are getting it written down, stripped of the power that a really good speaker can give it. Second, the diegetic audience are different people than the reader, with a different set of cultural assumptions and values. This can be as simple as feeling a stir of pride when language or music evokes national symbols, and goes all the way to complicated cultural markers and tropes. (What we'd today call memes!) The best rhetoric is often the most targeted at its specific audience, specifically because that can be so effective, but the result can leave modern readers cold. It's definitely one of those areas that depends on the author's strengths and the style of the narrative.
Cass, what have you been working on, and what's coming up for you next?
CASS: The Bloodstained Shade, Book 3 of the Aven Cycle, just released at the end of January. It's out in paperback and ebook now, and there's an audiobook coming in May. There will be a Book 4, someday, but at the moment I'm working on something entirely different—the secondworld fantasy inspired by early modern London that I mentioned earlier. That's still in drafting stage, and I'm so enjoying the ongoing application of everything I've learned about worldbuilding and writing craft in the past few years.
Event-wise, I'm doing a virtual workshop on developing magical systems for the Orange County Public Library on March 21st—open to anyone, whether you're an OCPL member or not! Then I'll be at RavenCon April 21-23 in Richmond, VA and at ConCarolinas June 2-4 in Charlotte, NC.
For more worldbuilding goodness, you can find me along with co-hosts Rowenna Miller and Marshall Ryan Maresca on Worldbuilding for Masochists, our two-time Hugo Finalist podcast! Available on all your favorite podcast platforms, with new episodes dropping every other Wednesday. We start our fifth year in June, and we'll be kicking off the season with a pretty exciting announcement!
I usually direct people to Twitter @CassRMorris as the best place to find me for general chatting, and while that's still the best place for now, with the increasing instability of the old bird, I'll also direct folks toward my LinkTree, which will always have the most up-to-date social media haunts, and my Substack, for major announcements and random acts of blogging.

I might know Larrez is actually Rezlar, but it seems the kids haven’t realized it. It’s not like they’ve shown any indication of paying attention to politics. With Teemo off helping Jello, it’s not like I could tell them, even if I wanted to. No, I told him I’d be willing to keep that secret, and I don’t see why I should change that.
 
At least I know why Teemo was grinning and acting like he was. He probably recognized him as soon as he saw him. Well, what’s done is done. I look through what I have available to send to greet the group, and decide on a significantly harder probing encounter than usual. A viper and a few rats wouldn’t even slow down Rhonda or Freddie, so I need to step up my game a bit.
 
Oh, I should try painting some of the snake scales with the metal transmutation stuff some time. If we can get it to only infuse the scales, that should be a good way to toughen a snake up. I file that idea away for later as I nudge an electric dire rat and a spitting viper to go test the kids. The gatherer groups give the two denizens a wide berth, and it’s not long before Fiona taps the back of Freddie’s head and points.
 
The young orc looks and nods as he readies his shield and axe. “Looks like Thedeim is ready to get started. Electric dire rat and a spitting viper.”
 
Rhonda nods at that as Lucas pulls a little shard of metal from the brim of the goblin’s hat, the goblin herself opening her book to a specific rune. “There should be an opening to attack after they start. They like to fire from range before closing,” she says as magic starts to awaken the rune in the book.
 
Rezlar looks pretty nervous, but seeing the confidence in the other two helps steady him. He takes a deep breath before shifting his feet. “Tide Stance…” he murmurs as he settles into the classic fencing stance: feet wide, sword forward and raised slightly, back hand held behind and high for balance. I’m a bit surprised to see a watery duplicate of his rapier appear over his head. I can still see a bit of unease in his eyes, but his form looks pretty solid to me.
 
“I can counter the spit,” he says as he steps up beside Freddie, and the orc smiles.
 
“Rhonda and I can handle the lightning, then. Funneling Bulwark!” he shouts as the dire rat starts to spark with the beginning of its attack. Back with Rhonda, Lucas’ metal shard glows slightly as the rune on Rhonda’s book flashes.
 
“Lightning Rod!” Freddie’s ethereal shields help channel the bolt of lightning as the dire rat unleashes it, focusing it into the earth at Freddie’s feet, thanks to the magical influence of Rhonda and her familiar.
 
The spitting viper hisses and launches a glob of venom/poison, and this time it’s Rezlar who reacts.
 
“Riptide Riposte!” he shouts as he lunges towards the dire rat, the watery rapier intercepting the attack from the viper. It turns an unpleasant purple as it absorbs the attack, but that’s not all Rezlar is up to. His lunge meets the dire rat and scores a good gash down its side, and the water doppelganger of his weapon flashes forward to deposit the unpleasant purple into the wound.
 
Rezlar steps back as Freddie steps forward, raising his shield to deflect the enraged bite from the wounded unusually-sized rodent. Freddie sidesteps to take the attack from the viper as Rezlar steps in once more, and I start to get an idea for why he called it Tide Stance. Each time he hits, the water rapier hits again a moment later. It’s like watching waves on a beach erode a sandcastle. I kinda want to see him fight the rockslides, he’d probably do pretty well against them.
 
Fiona, still on Freddie’s back, weaves a quick net and manages to entangle the viper, giving Rhonda an easy target for an Icicle Spear. The group holds their combat stances for a few moments, until they get the experience, and then they relax. Rezlar brings his water rapier to overlap his regular one, before flicking it away to splash on the ground, carrying with it the blood from the electric dire rat.
 
Freddie smiles at the newest member of their party and claps him on the shoulder. “Good work! That would usually take me and Rhonda a lot longer to clear!” Rezlar looks a bit embarrassed at that, but doesn’t argue as Rhonda pipes up.
 
“Yeah! That’s some fancy swordwork, Larrez! With you, I think we can take some of Thedeim’s more defensive monsters, like the slimes and rockslides!”
 
“Is… that a good idea?”
 
Rhonda shrugs. “It’s not a bad one. We’ve been avoiding them because they take too long for just me and Freddie to handle, but your Tide Stance looks like it’s great for getting through defenses!”
 
Rezlar slowly nods at that. “It is, yes. Water is very good at getting around defenses, finding the smallest weakness and expanding it. It works very well with my fencing,” he says, looking more comfortable talking about theoretical application than actually applying it. Luckily for him, (or unluckily, depending on how one looks at it) Rhonda is all about applying theoreticals.
 
“Great! We’ll show you the maze, and then head down to the caverns to see if we can handle stuff in there!” Plan made, the group sets off. They don’t end up going into the maze, as the line is looking a bit long. That doesn’t stop them from getting on top and getting a good view of what’s going on.
 
I can feel Rezlar tense once Tiny looks at the group, but the big spider simply waves a foreleg at them and continues on his way.
 
“Is that… normal?” asks the poor noble, and the others nod.
 
“Yeah,” says Freddie. “If you’re just up here to look, he’ll ignore you. I don’t know what he’ll do if you try to get through the webbing up here and cheat the maze, but I wouldn’t try it.”
 
“I half expected to see Vernew up here,” Rhonda idly states, scanning the flat expanse that is the top of the maze, interrupted only by the trees of Tiny’s lair.
 
Freddie shrugs. “She must be busy.”
 
“Yeah… maybe we can visit her in the enclave? With Larrez, we should be able to get through the encounters there without having to spend so much time.”
 
“Vernew?”
 
Freddie smiles and starts walking back the way they came. “Yeah, she’s one of the leaders of the spiderkin enclave. She’s the Huntsmistress. Kinda bold and brash, but she’s cool.”
 
“I wonder if her spear and javelin techniques would translate into fencing,” asks Rhonda, looking to Rezlar for the answer.
 
“Maybe? I’ve sparred against various spears before, and they’ve never been especially insightful for my own techniques, but I’ve never sparred with a spiderkin,” he admits.
 
“She’s hard to pin down, I feel like you two would be chasing each other all over the battlefield, trying to land a solid hit,” says Freddie as he thinks on how the two might face each other.
 
Rezlar quirks an eyebrow at that. “You’ve seen her fight?”
 
Rhonda nods. “Yeah, beating her was one of our challenges to get our classes. We were lucky and she underestimated us, and we managed to get her caught in a big web tangle.”
 
Fiona and Lucas both chitter, and Freddie chuckles. “Heh, and ourselves, too. It took Tiny several minutes to untangle everyone. I think she’d be up for a friendly spar, if she has time. She might be out on a hunt, too,” he points out. A Huntsmistress isn’t likely to just laze around the enclave all day, waiting for plucky youngsters to come challenge her to a spar.
 
“We could follow our first plan and go check in on Rocky, then?” suggests Rhonda as they start to get off from the top of the maze.
 
“Might be the better idea, yeah. I don’t want to be out too late. I’m supposed to do a vigil around sunset.”
 
“Yeah, and I need to bottle some potions, too.”
 
Rezlar doesn’t seem to have anything pressing, or at least nothing he’ll admit to. “Where are the mining nodes? We could let me mine some tin, make our way to Violet for your quests, and go visit, uh… Rocky… before calling it a day?”
 
Freddie frowns as he goes over the timeframe. “I think we’ll have to come back later to play with Rocky. We can get some mining done on the way to Violet, but we’ll probably see enough encounters on the way that we should just head to the ratkin enclave and through the cemetery to get back home on time.”
 
The group nods to that, and set off, having a plan to be done before their other responsibilities have to be attended to. I watch them go about their fun as I nudge Queen with the steel scales idea, and she seems all for it. She even wants to try giving electric affinity, which I like the sound of. The kids might not get to spar one of my scions or one of the leaders of an enclave, but I still want to give them a boss battle. You know, something to remember their first delve as a party by.
 
 
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Cover art Want moar? Discord is a thing! I now have a Patreon for monthly donations, and I have a Ko-fi for one-off donations. Patreons can read up to three chapters ahead, and also get a few other special perks as well. Thank you again to everyone who is reading!

My partner lets call her April (24F) and I (26M) have been together for about 10 years and lived together for for about 6. We have 3 kids, both work alternating times (for the kids) and were happy.
We are committed to each other but have had 3-ways a couple of times, the most recent late last year. Outside of that we always trusted each other, or so I thought.
I can't remember exactly when it started but a couple of months ago April started having chest pains, eventually went to the doctor and found out she had an STI, so I went to the doctor and tested positive also.
We both naturally assumed its was from the 3way. April was fuming but I was feeling very burnt out from the amount of other unrelated problems in my life lately so i took a "whats happened has happened, let's take our pills and move on" approach. I thought we would move on and put it behind us. I was wrong.
April spoke to the person we had had the 3 way with and they produced an STI test result letter from very soon after the 3-way that was negative across the board.
I should have mentioned this earlier but to be clear, I have not been with anyone other than April and the threesome with April, which only happened that one time in recent history.
Now I know in this case my natural response should have been to believe that she had been unfaithful. I can't fully explain why, but I just didn't feel it. I trust her. I went through a rough time years ago and had some doubts but she always proved me wrong and maybe that just ingrained it in me that I can trust her.
April however, did not take this response. She believes without a doubt that I have cheated on her. There have been many arguments. I understand how it looks from her perspective, that would give anyone doubt.
What I can't understand is why trust can't overrule that? I have tried to prove it to her as much as I can. I work an 8-5 Monday to Friday. I do not go out alone or with friends. Ever. I'm at work, at home, with my parter or traveling between work an home. This is not an exaggeration, this is 100% of my time, I have no opportunity to cheat even if I wanted to. I'm also never talking to anyone on my phone I've given her the opportunity to go through it. I have also downloaded a tracker so she can see where I am 24/7 for future. Everyone I know is family, colleagues or my partners friends. I don't know anyone and I don't go anywhere. She knows this, she's sees it, yet still thinks I'm off having an affair??
My initial reactions have not helped matters. April thinks it's wierd I wasn't more upset that we caught and STI and thinks it's strange for me to not be accusing her if I know it's not me. I get that but I can't explain it any better than I have above.
I cant explain where that STI came from but im ready to just accept that and forget about it.
I just don't know what to do, if there was a way to prove I didn't do anything I would in a heart beat but as far as I can think there just isn't. What should I do?
TLDR: my partner and I caught an STI, she believes I cheated but I did not. It is ruining, possibly going to end, our 10 year relationship.

I was just wandering if UPS impacts playtime because I’m planning to start a save I’m fairly certain will make my UPS drop at some point, and I was wondering if this impacted the playtime value that Factorio tracks.
Quick side note, how many people have beat Py and/or PyAE?

Hi folks,
I started a new job last year in IT, and one thing I've noticed is that people often like to talk over each other during staff meetings. It varies from one team another, with some folks being more respectful of each person's time than others. But it very much seems to be the name of the game here.
I've always been an introvert with a dash of social anxiety, and from a young age, I was always told to wait your turn before speaking. Sadly, this has meant that I rarely, if ever, get that many words in during a meeting, and even when I wish to interject and clarify a statement, I refrain from doing so. I fear that this causes me to come across as aloof or disengaged, when most of the time I'm not. I also fear that because I'm not the typical backslapping jokester, people will see me as unapproachable.
When I do find myself cutting someone off (particularly women, for whom I know that this has always been an issue in the American workplace), I immediately apologize and retreat. However, I am the only that does this. Some folks feel no shame in talking over each other. When I was child, interrupting my father, even if it wasn't with malicious intentions, would often elicit a mean, passive-aggressive, "well like I was saying before your RUDELY interrupted" response. So naturally, I was wired to just be a fly on the wall. Sadly, this has hurt my career in the modern-day as it makes me appear slow and dimwitted. It's also caused me to settle for less in life and take jobs that were terrible careecultural fits because I've normalized getting screamed at. My mom has since remarried, and her husband and his kids (who happen to be a few years younger than I) seem much more well-socialized. Everyone sees them and tells me to "just be myself," but at the end of the day, barring a few behaviors I have worked on in therapy, this is pretty much who I am.
So my main question is, how do I deal with people who like to talk over me/each other? It's a personality trait that I absolutely despise, but I feel as though this is the norm, and if I can't beat them, I'll have to join them.

Art thee kidding ??? what the **** art thou talking about sir ? thou art a biggest loos'r i ev'r seen in mine own life ! thou wast doing PIPI in thy pamp'rs at which hour i wast beating playeth'rs much m're stout'r then thee! thou art not proffesional, because proffesionals kneweth how to loseth and congratulate opponents, thou art liketh a wench crying aft'r i did beat thee! beest brave, beest honest to yourself and stand ho this trush talkings!!! ev'rybody knoweth yond i am v'ry valorous blitz playeth'r, i can winneth anyone in the w'rld in single game! and "w"esley "s"o is nobody f'r me, just a playeth'r who is't art crying ev'ry single timeth at which hour loosing, ( rememb'r what thee sayeth about firouzja ) !!! stand ho playing with mine own nameth, i des'rve to has't a valorous nameth during whole mine own chess carri'r, i am officially inviting thee to otb blitz matcheth with the prize fund! both of us shall invest 5000$ and winn'r doth take t all! i suggesteth all oth'r people who is't's intrest'd in this situation, just taketh a behold at mine own results in 2016 and 2017 blitz w'rld championships, and yond shouldst beest enow. Nay needeth to hark f'r ev'ry crying babe, tigran petrosyan is at each moment playeth fair ! and if 't be true someone shall continueth officially speak of me liketh yond, we shall meeteth in court! god blesseth with true! true shall nev'r kicketh the bucket ! li'rs shall did kick off

First, this story is about an old friend of mines who shared how his family had one pitbull back in the 2000s. The dog was purchased when it was a baby pitbull. He raised this pitbull up all around relatives, his kids, and any other friends of his. He thought the dog was trained after being trained and would never attack anybody including himself.
One night he came home from work after a late night shift. He came into his garage only to be met by the pitbull giving him that death glare that they have. So, the pit charged at him instantly and he had a fight with this dog.
He had to use all his strength to pick it up physically and slam the entire body hard against the garage concrete. He said he used all his strength again to slam it against the wall very violently because he went into survival mode to where if he had to take out the dog he said he would’ve. He even grabbed a heavy metal chain to try to beat it.
It didn’t touch his kids or anything. No one knew he was battling a dog at like 3am-4am in the morning. Like a brutal attack went on for several minutes. I don’t remember whether he broke the pitbull legs or what not but the fight was brutal. I remember questioning why even bother to have these dogs? They are like walking sharks on four legs.
They have no mercy or no doggy sense to not randomly attack people. You can train all you want to think you got the best pitbull but you DO NOT.
Luckily, he survived the fight but after had the dog euthanized after that because he didn’t see any use to selling it or putting in the local community animal shelters. That dog snapped on him but he was in shocked thinking that it would’ve never happened. I couldn’t imagine being viscously attacked after coming home from work. He claimed the dog was playful prior to leaving for work. To each it’s own these dogs are dangerous.

Been in Kerala for a good while now, and there's one thing I simply cannot understand at all - the glorification of fights. It is as though there is a desire to be in fights and boast about it. I've seen fights in (Government) colleges between different departments and fights in school because of a girl (who, obviously, didn't care one bit).Being in fights, beating someone else, and what not, just ... Why?
Do the men of Kerala really think fighting is "cool"? Or that fighting elevates/protects their imaginary status of greatness?
For a state considered literate, socially close to each other - the fact that people fight like dogs is laughable. I'm not sure how many other states have fights like people in this state do. Other states doing it or not shouldn't matter in all fairness.
And the worst part is that there is glorification of physical strength/fights in Cinema. Look at movies like 'Thallumala'. Malapuram, a district which I've heard has a reputation for gang fights is chosen to showcase more of exactly that - meaningless fights. Great work people. Exactly what we need the youth to see. Pat on the back for y'all's 👏🏻

I've been to churchofchrist once. A preacher there was asking for "hard questions" that cocs might be asked. He claimed he was going to write a book of answers so active coc members could be prepared in advance. IIRC, these are some of the questions I asked off the top of my head. They were deleted for being "disrespectful to the coc". What do you think? Are any of them disrespectful, or do they just not agree with coc doctrine?
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If God is perfect (can't make a mistake) and holy (can't lie) and I ask Him what is 2+2 in the real number system, does He have any choice but to answer 4. If no, then is there a higher absolute truth and law that even God must yield to?
If God is "no respecter of persons" and He "knew use before He formed us in the womb", why did he love Jacob and hate Esau? Did He create Esau just to hate him? Remember, Esau couldn't make one hair black or white.
God says, "marriage is honorable in all and the bed undefiled". If I drive to the red-light district, pick up a hooker I've never seen, drive her straight to the courthouse for a legal marriage, then take her home and knowing only her first name, we screw until we can't walk - is God happy with that? If not, why did he tolerate parental arranged marriages for centuries?
God says, "Whosoever shall look upon a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart." Does this mean if my wife and I found each other attractive when we first met, we committed adultery because we weren't married yet? After we are married, should we go forward in front of the church and confess our public adultery asking for forgiveness? If we are 100% faithful to each other unto death, but never asked God to forgive us for committing adultery before we were married, are we both going to Hell?
How many married couples in the church of Christ have gone forward, repented and asked forgiveness for adultery because they knew before they got married that they wanted to have sex and children?
God said we should strive to be perfect like Him and Jesus. God also says that our righteousness is as "filthy rags" (literally menstrual cloth) before Him. When perfection (martyrdom?) is the minimum standard and even that is considered a bloody tampon, what chance do we really have with God?
If God knows everything, can He ever learn anything?
Do you want to go to Heaven? Do you want to go Right Now? Why not?
God said that if a father beats his son with a rod "he will not die". Is that verse literal? Can a child take an unlimited amount of beating and still "not die"?
Why are elders required to have children when Paul said, "It is better for a man not to touch a woman"?
In Revelation are the 144,000 who follow the Lamb wherever he goes really virgins? If marriage is honorable in all, how could they be defiled by "women"? Why do no women virgins get to follow the Lamb?
Before a close encounter with God, why did Moses tell the Israelite men "go not at your wives" if the marriage bed is undefiled? Does God find sex offensive? If so, why did He create it?
Why does Genesis call Adam's Baculum bone his rib? Do most women know they were created from a man's Baculum bone?
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Sorry for the long post.

There are so many things I want to say, and I have no idea how to even word them.
I'll just give an example. Take "getting exotics" as an example. You to have do legendary lost sectors. Who is this for? Seriously.
If you ask a "casual" player. They find it difficult, stressful, and frustrating. The difficulty is high, and they can't play with friends. When they finally do beat it, and they don't get the exotic they wanted, it's demotivating
If you ask a "hardcore" player. They find it boring, and monotonous. It's not hard for them, it's just a matter of finding the most efficient way to decimate it. They run it 5h straight, get bad roles, or the wrong exotic. If they finally get the roll they want, it's not a "yay!". It's a "sweet lord, I can go do something I enjoy".
So seriously, who is this for. From what I can tell, there's like ten people that actually enjoy doing legendary/master lost sectors. It's like bungie tried to find a sweet spot, and they just ended up with something horrible
And that sentiment can be shared with most things in the game. For example, take raids. Now look, I know I'm about to piss a lot of people off. But, The Day 1 raid for this season was the easiest it's ever been. Someone told me some stat about how "More people completed this day 1 raid, then every other raid in Destiny 1 and 2s history combined (excluding re released raids)". I'm not saying that it was "easy". I'm just saying that it was way way way way easier than the previous day 1 raids
And look, if you beat this raid. I'm not trying to take anything away from you, I'm happy for you. But bungie didn't do that just so you could experience the joy of a day one raid (probably). Their true intention was to make the base raid easier. The reality is that a lot of the player base is apprehensive about raiding. It can be really challenging for some people, and some people have a hard time getting a team, or reaching out to a team. Bungie wanted to make the raid more accessible for them (probably). A noble goal.
But just like the lost sectors. That intention is ruining the game. Again, I'm not trying to ruffle any feathers. Just being honest here. If we really boil it down, that raid is 4 people doing ad clear, and 2 people doing the mechanics. And I know you can boil down most raid mechanics to caveman talk, but that's an actual realistic explanation of the duties in that raid. Firstly, a raid that simplistic destroys it's replayability. Personally speaking, I'm already tired of it. Generally speaking, the first month of the raid is people learning more optimal ways to do an encounter, then that strat slowly propagates. And that's a really enjoyable experience, to do the encounters in new ways. But there's really nothing to optimize in this raid, because it's just too simplistic. Yeah, there are some things. But they're tiny adjustments that have very little affect on the core gameplay. Secondly, teaching it is... not as fun an experience as it has been in the past. It doesn't really feel great to tell someone "Hey, you're killing ads, but don't worry, that's just the raid, I'm not cutting you out intentionally!". And finally, while some of you are going to cause a big huff about this, a Day 1 raid is something the hardcore community holds very dearly. And to trample on it like this, it really takes alot away from the game for them.
Last thing I want to talk about is weapons. And this is really just my opinion. But do you guys really like how things currently are? I mean, every good weapon in the game has a bunch of clones of itself. For example, Reeds Regret, Taipan, and stormchaser.
Whatever weapon ends up being good gets cloned, and it gets added into the game in a way that makes it easily accessible. Generally, you can get an absolute top of the meta gun in under an hour. I'm all for respecting peoples time, but ultimately, I play Destiny 2 because I want something to do. I want something to chase. And I want to satisfaction of finally getting that thing. With the way things are, I don't get any of those things.
I was basically done with this expansion in 2 weeks. Sure, there's stuff I could grind. Like the immortal SMG. But I know something else will release later, and it'll cost me less time. So whatever
But anyways. I just want to ask, however you are. Whatever side of the fence you stand on, hardcore or casual. Are you truly content with how the game is right now? Personally, I feel like they've tried to compromise the 2 ideologies too much, and it's resulted in the base difficulty spiking (which is stressful for a more casual player) and the high end content becoming easier (which is boring for a more hardcore player). Everyone loses.