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These are indeed big philosophical considerations.
What are they doing in a webcomic?!
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awesomeersysobelvvalkyrifile770_feedpetrasanguinity and ride_4ever for donating to your local food banks/pantries! This post has details on how to get me to write for you next by donating.Darren and Geoffrey celebrate Halloween during university.
El, Peter, and Neal get naked.
sovayspatch and I have performed our civic duties and received stickers in exchange for the exercise of democracy. It's been at least a year since we had to prove our residence in this ward and precinct, but the original experience was so scarifying that we still show up carrying utility bills just in case. The moon was brilliantly full and some of the leaves streetlight-orange in it. Earlier in the afternoon, I walked some distance by the side of a road where the afternoon sun had tinted the conservation meadows like ambrotypes. I have seen the news of the death of Dick Cheney. Twenty-five years sooner would have been better, but I had begun to wonder if he was even in the machine. Since Halloween, WERS has been playing a lot of the Last Dinner Party's "This Is the Killer Speaking" (2025). I am completly unsurprised that the band has covered Sparks.starwatcher posting in fandom_checkinHow are you doing?
I am OK.
11 (55.0%)
I am not OK, but don't need help right now.
9 (45.0%)
I could use some help.
0 (0.0%)
How many other humans live with you?
I am living single.
9 (45.0%)
One other person.
8 (40.0%)
More than one other person.
3 (15.0%)
senmutThe pieces have been placed, and while Ahsoka and Luminara are a part of it, neither lets it impact Barriss's peace.
cosmolinguistI agreed to do a favor for someone at work that meant going to Sheffield this afternoon.
I was briefly filmed answering a few questions that the interviewer thought I had in advance but either I didn't, I didn't read the email that contained them, or I did read them but they were so boring and generic I forgot that they existed. All seem about equally likely.
It was very quick and dull but then I got to do something way more exciting, which was see sfred and actually catch up in person, something we haven't done in so long we don't even remember when it would last have happened. We agreed that Dreamwidth is a great way of keeping in touch, but also being able to hug was better. I was not prepared to be able to be gracious in response to being told that the gym has made me noticeably more hench, heh.
We talked a lot about how good the Springsteen movie was, of course.
Getting home was going far too smoothly (I got on a train with plenty of time to spare despite it arriving only three minutes after I got to the station! I'm not used to this) until we got delayed and then diverted around some kind of ominous-sounding incident in or near Stockport. By the time I finally got to Piccadilly, it was chaos as almost everything departs via Stockport and even trains that don't, like mine home, were held up behind all the other trains.
So I got home just in time to eat dinner and then it's bedtime!
I get to stay home tomorrow, and then I'm off again on Thursday, work takes me to Liverpool this time to do something equally dull but it'll take much longer.
badly_knitted posting in get_knittedcora): What was your last project that got put into "time out" and why?
duskpeterson
Free at my website.
Empty Dagger Hand (The Three Lands). Dolan is a quiet young man who spends his days working as a scribe. So why does he carry a hidden dagger?
New installment:
Side story | Loyal Revenge. His loyalty and his wickedness have come into conflict with each other.
My readers at Patreon and Ream get the first look at Flight Through the Forest (The Thousand Nations: The Motley Crew #2). That novella will go into general release next month.
Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket.
New installment:
I'm sorry for posting so little online fiction last month; I spent all month struggling to transfer computers, so that I could retain/regain laptop access to the web, which I managed to achieve at the beginning of this month. Fortunately, I was able to edit and lay out "Flight Through the Forest" on my old laptop in the meantime.
The novella Heir (The Three Lands: Blood Vow side story) is up next on my release schedule. If you started reading Chronicles of the Great Peninsula during the last few years, here's your chance to meet several of Dolan's kinfolk, back when they were young. If you've been reading Chronicles of the Great Peninsula for a while now, here's the return of the characters from The Fire Before, fourteen years later. If you're a careful reader of Chronicles of the Great Peninsula, you know what's about to happen to the town of Valouse.
ranunculus
ranunculusmajuspikedluvfandomgiftbasket this round. I hope you enjoy them!impala_chick for fandomgiftbasket 2025. One of their prompts was the rest of the team finding out about them. I hope you enjoy this variation on that!logans_girl2001 for fandomgiftbasket 2025. They asked for Teen Wolf, Derek/Stiles and one of their ‘likes' was Soulmate AUs of all kinds. I hope you enjoy this! Title from a Journey song that popped into my head.scalziwhatever_feed
Some stories go beyond the page, presenting themselves as “living stories,” as author Charles H. Melcher calls them. Read all about these living stories in the Big Idea for his newest book, The Future of Storytelling, and see how a story can be capable of invoking all the senses, make you the main character of the story, and offer a glimpse into the future.
CHARLES H. MELCHER:
My quest to find the people and technologies that are reinventing storytelling has often led me to some unexpected places.
One evening in 2014 I found myself in a former mail-processing facility in London, taking in a performance of The Drowned Man by the immersive theater company Punchdrunk. The conceit was that you were in a Hollywood-like film studio where a movie was being shot. Upon entering, guests were given masks and asked to keep them on at all times and not to speak. Otherwise, there were no rules, and the nearly 600 guests were free to roam around the building like ghosts, either exploring the many intricately designed rooms or following specific actors as they performed scenes in different locations.
After a couple hours of wandering and watching, I grew tired and was thinking of calling it a night, when just then a beautiful young actress in a tight leopard-print dress and ruby-red lipstick drifted into the room. I chose to stay a little longer and see what unfolded. I followed her, along with some of the other guests, as she performed different scenes, until she ducked behind a door that I hadn’t noticed. On a whim, I decided to see where she was headed, so I followed her. She was waiting for me on the other side and quickly shut the door behind me and locked it. She motioned for me to follow her down a hallway into a little office. There, she reached up and took off my mask. My cloak of invisibility had been removed, and I felt exposed, face-to-face with this actress, just the two of us.
She hung my mask on a coat rack and took a Humphrey Bogart– style trench coat off the hook. She put it on me, tying the belt and adjusting the collar just so, and then led me by the arm down a narrow corridor that got progressively darker until it was pitch black. Finally, she let go.
I was alone in the dark, every one of my senses on high alert. After what felt like a long time, I suddenly heard a voice over a loudspeaker yell, “Action!” followed by a popping sound and an explosion of light, then another pop and another burst of light. As my eyes adjusted, I realized I was surrounded by about thirty silver umbrellas, the kind photographers use to diffuse strobe lights. And then I saw her, the actress, starting to walk slowly toward me—but she was completely transformed. She had an intense, almost crazed look in her eyes. I was worried that she was no longer a friend but a foe—maybe even insane. As she drew closer to me, I froze, fearful that I was going to need to physically defend myself against her. She raised her hand up toward my neck and then laid it gently on my cheek. When she took another step forward, I could feel the warmth of her body up against mine. I could smell the sweetness of her perfume. Instinctively, my hands went around her waist.
As she looked longingly up into my eyes, I was no longer afraid of her—now I was afraid of myself. What role was I willing to play here? I’m a happily married man, but there I was, alone in a room with a beautiful starlet in my arms. While I contemplated whether to lean in for a kiss, I heard the same voice over the loudspeaker yell, “Cut!” and everything returned to pitch black. The actress moved away and I was alone, every part of my body shaking with excitement and uncertainty. Then I felt her hand on my arm, and she led me back down the corridor into the small office, where she removed my trench coat, hung it on the hook, and put my mask back on. Finally, as she was about to see me unceremoniously out the door, she stopped and whispered in my ear: “I think you would be great for the part.” I was off again, left afloat among the hundreds of other ghosts in the building. I’d entered the experience as a voyeur, but by the end, I was playing a role—in fact, I realized I had been auditioning for the role of the leading man. And as unsettling as it was, I loved it. For the rest of the weekend, I walked around London just a little bit taller, feeling like James Bond, with the sense that adventure might be waiting for me around any corner.
This experience made me realize that I was craving a new type of storytelling, one that is participatory, multisensory, interactive, and highly personal; stories that aren’t confined within a screen, a pair of headphones, the words on a page, or a theatrical proscenium but exist all around us, engage with us, and even change based on our decisions. And I’m not alone: Creators and audiences all over the world are embracing embodied, immersive stories, although the scale and breadth of this trend is still invisible to most.
A revolution in storytelling is taking place, and it is going to have profound implications in almost every field. It’s happening in the top-secret tech labs of Meta, Apple, and Google; in avant-garde performances at fringe theater festivals; in escape rooms housed in storefronts of suffering shopping malls; in cores of quantum supercomputers containing next-generation artificial intelligence; in the newest VR and AR headsets; and in centuries-old museums. It’s happening at festivals like SXSW, Cannes Lions, and Comic-Con; in restaurants and bars; in old garages and abandoned bowling alleys; in Hollywood studios and Madison Avenue advertising agencies; on university campuses and at nonprofit organizations. It’s happening in the middle of the desert in Nevada and on a palm-sized device that lives inside the pocket of nearly every person who will read my book The Future of Storytelling.
As the publisher of Melcher media and the founder of the Future of StoryTelling (FoST) Summit, I’ve been incredibly lucky to get invited into the studios, labs, offices, and academic corridors where the future of living stories is being invented. I have come to believe that if we can understand the mechanics and unleash their full power, living stories – a term I coined – have the potential to become more popular than Hollywood and gaming have ever been. Artists and storytellers have a new opportunity to serve their audiences by creating experiences in which the audience plays an active role.
Something beautiful happens when creators relinquish control of the narrative to their audience. The reason living stories are so powerful is that they engage not only our eyes and ears but our whole person. They gift us experiences that our brains and spinal cords are primed for, thanks to millions of years of evolution. You can feel your response to a living story in the hairs on the back of your neck, in the pit of your stomach, in the ache in your thighs as you move and choose, emote, and think through these experiences.
Just imagine: How different is it to read a book or see a movie about surviving a natural disaster than to believe in the moment that you did? How much more satisfying is it when you, not King Arthur, are able to pull the sword out of the stone? Stories have always provided us with a safe, instructive way to survive the world, as we observe characters making choices (often the wrong ones). With living stories, those characters are us, and we learn from the choices we make, and learn deeply, because we feel them throughout our own bodies. Living stories are a gateway to a more intense emotional life, to living more fully in the world.
I wrote The Future of Storytelling not to undermine the traditional storytelling forms, or to suggest that they should or will be replaced. I wrote it because of my love for living stories and my excitement for what these stories can and will do now and in the future, due to breakthroughs in technology, storycrafting, world-building, and our perpetual yearning for new paradigms.
For storytellers, audiences, and stories themselves, it’s an exciting time to be alive.
The Future of Storytelling: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Author socials: Website
scalziwhatever_feed
All the Scalzis voted today, because that’s what you do. Here we have are electing township trustees and board of education members — not hugely sexy, but actually important for where we live. Every election counts, is what I’m saying. If today is a voting day for you, I hope you went out there and did the thing — and if you haven’t done it yet, as of 12:30pm, it’s not too late! You have several more hours! Do the thing!
— JS
irregular_comic_rss3_feed - Irregular Webcomic! #2939 Rerunnanila in awesomeers - Just One Thing (05 November 2025)ysobel - (no subject)vvalkyri - (no subject)file770_feed - Pixel Scroll 11/4/2025 Can We Have Pixels For Breakfast, Filer Dear, Filer Dear?petra - Food Bank Thank-Yous, an earworm, and readingsovay - A lie you told to the maze I'm inminoanmiss - Today in Politicsstarwatcher in fandom_checkin - Daily Check-insenmut - 30 in 30: SW:TCWcosmolinguist - Sheffieldbadly_knitted in get_knitted - Check-In Post - Nov 4th 2025duskpeterson - UPDATE: Loyal Revenge (Empty Dagger Hand side story) + Thousand Nations early access fictionranunculus - Sleep, Glorious Sleep!ranunculus - Ness of Brogargreghousesgf - (no subject)maju - (no subject)spikedluv - Fandom Gift Basket 2025 Fic: Hawkeye (tv)Hawkeye (comic)/Thunderbolts (2025) & Teen Wolf (tv)scalziwhatever_feed - The Big Idea: Charles H. Melcherscalziwhatever_feed - We’ve Voted!timeasmymeasure
