A Half-Scratch Liver Rhapsody Home

1.0.1 20260527T145000 Prev: 1.0.0

These guidelines are prescriptive, not descriptive. Meaning comes from your words, and you discover what you meant as they appear.

This document will be continuously updated as I get bored and think of more things that everyone should always do.

  1. The most important thing is freedom.
    1. Don’t allow yourself to be boxed in by rules. Rules are meant to be broken, and if rules aren’t consistent, they may as well not exist. Do whatever you want.
    2. The cognitive load of determining if the circumstances you’re in warrant applying a breakable rule or not is too high for everyone. Hence, when encountering a rule, ignore it, it’s easier.
  2. Have contempt for your genre (and audience).
    1. You’ve been forced into this life by circumstance. You entered the industry with wide-eyed dreams of showing off, of discovering new worlds, but alack, your ideas are horrible AND nobody wants anything original. So, take the best of both worlds, and requisition a flooded dike to fill with your horrible ideas. Now everyone hates you for taking the disgusting river they loved and dumping your brand of dead batteries in it, but at least you’ve staved off killing yourself. It was a mistake getting into the ‘media’ ‘industry’ anyways, you should’ve gotten into politics. Everyone just consumes short-form content. Fuck you.
  3. Just Write :)
    1. How can you write if you don’t write? Just write. Just write. Look you’re writing right now. Words words words. LOOK AT ALL THE VALUE YOU’RE ADDING TO THE WORLD WITH YOUR WORDS WORDS WORDS. THERE IS NO BETTER USE OF TIME.
    2. :)
  4. Make a conlang before starting.
    1. How will you have a consistent world without a conlang? Shakespeare invented the word ‘upstairs’, does Shakespeare exist in your world? ‘Algebra’ comes from Arabic, does Arabic exist in your world? ‘Steve’ comes from Greek, does Greek exist in your world? Would they really invent golf? Would they really have the same phonemes as English? Would they really be able to make the same puns we can? Quite convenient that either they translate correctly, or that they speak the same language.
  5. Make a big bang before starting
    1. Sure is convenient matter won the symmetry war. Sure is convenient the constant for vacuum permittivity is 8.85E-12. Sure is convenient sentient life evolved in this universe where gravity exists, who can breathe oxygen and, well actually no, if you have sentient life it makes sense they’d need to breathe oxygen in some form. There are a few answers to this:
      1. You’re a hack who doesn’t care about cause and effect, and who would rather show off a world based off the assumptions of ours than start from something truly fresh. You moron, you knave, you worm. You’re supposedly an artist! Yet you tether yourself to our fleshy world, and its fleshy assumptions, because it’s all you’ve known, and all any of your potential readers have known. Utterly pitiable. You will never escape samsara.
      2. Every (or, at least, a lot of) possibility is happening simultaneously, and this happens to be the one you wanted to focus on. I guess someone was so creatively bankrupt that they’d rather follow humans than follow an empty universe. Think of the potential! Who has ever done that? You could be the first!
      3. The world is literally based off ours. In which case, you’re writing a biography, uh, carry on.