Dark Academia Is Just When The Lightbulbs In The Library Haven’t Been Replaced In Nine Years

Sharpay diem, boys. Seize the day. Make your lives fabulous.

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Guide to Figuring out the Age of an Undated World Map.

Had to be there I guess

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Do you have any advice for someone about to dm for the first time? I'm less worried about running the session than how the hell do you plan one?

Btw Iove your art and it's inspired me to try out line work again

Thanks! And hey, that's a good question.

Here's the thing I've learned as a DM - you don't have to plan EVERYTHING.

In fact, the less you plan, the more prepared you'll be!*

*Some restrictions apply

How I like to think of when I DM is that me and my players sit in the middle of a WHEEL of possibilities. It looks something like this:

Every session you start with, you have a set amount of possible go-to points. These are limited. Usually, your party won't go from sipping drinks at a tavern to walking out the door and fighting cult members in ONE session.

The possibilities are endless, so what you need to prepare is just the next few steps. In the above image, what I mean is that they first two darker shades are representative of what you need to have prepared immediately, and the lighter shades are plans you can have on the back burner, but don't need to flesh out.

As your party makes choices and travels outside of the Starting Spot, you can prepare the NEXT steps based on the ones they chose.

So, say your party is in your tavern, and they decide to go to the Adventuring Guild to look for a job. You don't HAVE to prepare the Heist Mission in the Wizard's tower for that - you can know it's a possibility, but once they've made their first choice, you have a direction.

You can then kind of visualize what their next steps are.

Of course, this wheel isn't one way! Your players could always just... hop over to an adjacent topic! If they're solving a mystery, that could link up to a Cult involvement. And from there, they can discover a Secret Hideout for the Cult, which you already know was a possibility if they were to go into the forest.

And once that sort of adventure has started, you can go ahead and think about what other things you had planned out might link up to or evolve from where they are.

At that point, it's like playing a giant board-game. Which involves laying down track in front of an oncoming train.

My recommendation is that you keep a few things on hand which can be used anywhere:

a few maps that somewhat relate to multiple things on your map (for example, a dungeon-looking map that could be a Secret Hideout OR the Wizard's tower)

Some named NPCs - at least one per location that you can throw up immediately when they arrive

a few puzzles/plotpoints which can act as a placeholder while you think of details (for example, a Mystery can be hard to think of on the spot. Give them some random clues, such as a missing person, a few discarded items, etc and then take your time before the next session to link those items together!)

The rest is.. well... just making it up as you go along!

Of course, that's just MY personal way of doing things. Some people prepare way less, and some prepare way more. It's just all up to how quickly your players move/how comfortable you are with details.

I now have an academic rival. He is also my fencing rival. He is also my debate partner. I have achieved what all academic movies strive for. 

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crying

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i love you fuckboy jeremy knox. i love you jeremy sneaking into his ex-situationship's room through the window. i love you jeremy stealing a rose from his ex-situationship's garden. i love you jeremy desecrating the backseat of that car. i love you teenage dirtbag jeremy knox. i love you jeremy "why? is warren shopping for a new beemer?" knox. i love you jeremy's satisfied smile after laila asks how he's still talking to sheldon. i love you jeremy lying on the hotel bed with an arm thrown over his eyes. i love you jeremy "i'm not going down on you on linoleum" knox. i love you jeremy taking off his shirt for jean's attention. i love you jeremy "give me his new number and i'll tell him myself" knox. i love you jeremy smiling at the bobcats after they talked shit to his face. i love you jeremy "if i threw a rock into the chasm between your talents and his, i don't think i'd ever hear it hit bottom" knox. i love you captain sunshine jeremy knox who's not afraid to be a little mean. i love you i love you i love you.

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god i love doomed romances because it’s like. “what is grief if not love persevering” but the grief and love are happening at the same time. how do you grieve something that’s still alive? how do you love something that has always been dead? and the answer is just. intensely.

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)