"For a timewaster on the train trips too short to really read, I like the arty little apps? Where you drop sand or draw snowflakes or something."

"The types of puzzle games I tend to like are more—I wanna say hardcore without sounding lame but I don't think there's a way to do that—when I'm looking for timewasters I mostly listen to music."

"I listen to music too but it's not an activity all by itself, for me."

"Depends on the music, for me. Some I can have in the background, listen to it while I'm doing other stuff, but some I often like to just—listen to as a full-time activity."

"Maybe there's a deeper level of music appreciation than I've reached at which that would make sense. Sometimes I won't do very much else while listening to something new, or something with a story to it."

"Musicals are a very good example of that, yeah."

"A lot of them are too cheesy for me, but some of them are nice."

"The cheesiness is sometimes part of the appeal!—sometimes."

"Sometimes?"

"I mean, there's some cheesiness that's inherent to the medium, you can only break out into song so many times in random situations before it becomes a bit too much, right? But some musicals are good enough, musically and stuff, that you can just straightforwardly enjoy them—Oahk is a particularly moving example, I do recommend—and others embrace the silliness and only sometimes succeed."

"I've listened to one song from Oahk but not the whole thing. I forget the title, the chorus ends 'let's doom our children too' or something like that."

"'Let's damn our children too,' yeah, the song's A Future Bright. On the side of musicals that embrace the silliness you have ones like Amantana, which is one of the good ones, and The Erethani Prince, which is laughably terrible and incredibly melodramatic."

"I don't think I've heard any songs from those." She writes them down on her everything.

"Erethani Prince fails lots of, like, basic history and sociology checks and just tries to coast on the whole thing about, like, 'well everyone is grey in Ereith right?' And fails to make a compelling plot out of it."

"How does it coast on that?"

"Everything's an excuse for dueling or fighting, everyone's settling disputes by physical competitions, a bunch of scenes and songs are about being physically superior to your political opponent..."

"Sounds cheesily musical."

"Exactly!"

"Ereith is conceptually really interesting but I know very little about it in practice."

"I used to follow this Erethani blogger and she had a very scathing review of this musical and it's how I heard about it in the first place so then I just had to check it out and it was exactly as bad as she said it was."

"Ha. I wonder if there's anything that bad about Anitam? We're better represented internationally but people manage to be pretty darn ignorant..."

"Maybe something that leans real hard on the lack of centralized power? Or the patrilinearity, but Anitam's not the only place with that..."

"Patrilineality's not really complicated enough to get wrong."

"Yeah, I wasn't thinking complicated so much as 'let's try to make this a plot point and fail'."

"Like, hm, what's that story where somebody's pretending to be a man to get the wrong kind of birth control while the Oahkar are marching around forcing it on everyone, and then gets pregnant?"