iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I just told my DnD table that we're in the "endgame" of our campaign, as though it were chess, and now I'm wondering what other board game terminologies could be repurposed for TTRPGs

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I have a hill to die on after pilot writing class—so now I throw it to you. In mockumentaries, The Office explains its cameras while Parks & Rec/Modern Family never do (diegetic vs non-diegetic docs, if you will). Do you believe there is an actual camera crew following everything in Parks & Rec?

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

My kingdom for a writing partner (i.e., half a kingdom, payable after we write the kingdom together)

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Comma splices in formal writing: scandalous; egad; I would never Comma splices in my texts: seldom and spicy, who is she, wow look at how loosely these thoughts are draped together

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

My home game just underwent its longest lull to date, and I have to come back into it the most in medias res I've ever been.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Realizing I got right into the weeds in a thought-driven appreciation of everything Oscar Montoya taught us, when the workshop would have me more intuitively share, after sitting longer with the experience, what I’ve been feeling since—how inspired, grounded, and grateful I am for the momentum.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Thanks to a brilliant DCM workshop by @ozzy-mo.bsky.social, I finally get to post at the intersection between my academic work and my improv. Oscar pointed out that what an audience sees then IS onstage, and so natural movements and offhand spatial choices gain consequence—and we can use that.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Luckily, my first DCM show was Edi Patterson's Playgirl, a one-woman show that has her effectively using all the chairs, hopping between them multiple times per scene. I learned so much, she didn’t fall once.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

I learned tonight that "widdershins" has its counterpart, "doesil." So I'm to understand that I grew up knowing the obscure word for anti-clockwise but not its twin? Widdershins clearly has the better PR team.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

I completed the full gamut of UCB improv courses online, and now I'm staring down the prospect of doing improv on an actual stage for the first time at a DCM workshop (on physicality no less!). Object work, coming off the back wall, editing scenes—these are real-space skills now. Any tips?

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

I love coloring inside the lines. Parameters challenge us. A sonnet gains shape by filling its container. But if I'm given a kenku or homunculus who characteristically—iconically!—has limited speech, I'm all, "right, so the coolest thing they can do is immediately jailbreak language..."

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

There's been a concerning uptick in a certain kind of Princess Bride reference. More people have referenced the iocaine-powder-game-of-wits scene in the last week than I've heard in years—whereas Inigo Montoya quotes seem to have fallen off the map. I believe this to be a new recession indicator.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Once every few DnD sessions, me to my players: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious downtime?"

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

Honored a nat 20 and now my whole week is shot

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

I'm planning a DnD 5e combat that is almost entirely lair actions (think jailbreak in a small-but-magically-fortified jail) with one "combatant" who is a bumbling but backwardly prescient jailer... he makes all the right defensive moves for all the wrong reasons.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Growing up, I used to think that parties would be salon-style affairs (I may have read too much Austen too early, thinking I needed to ready "accomplishments"). So I memorized a lot of poetry "just in case"... Limping the dream along for a moment—what poem would you bring to the party?

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Since the earliest planning stages, I wanted my DnD campaign to have an "Into the Woods"-type structure. The "BBEG" combat shows up in the middle, and an arc seems resolved—but that's only the half of it. Then the intrigue spins out, complicated and interconnected and far from over.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

The pact weapon is just an enormous bobby pin.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Jealous they must have lost email too. In space, no one can hear you circle back.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

I love discovering new foods in books. Turkish delight, marzipan, chestnuts—all were "read first, taste later" phenomena. In a dream come true, I finally got to taste a real food in my own fictional world first! Strange that I had to build an entire Victorian Feywild just to try Sno-Caps...

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

Trying to take it as a sign of expertise and not futility that writing my dissertation has begun to feel like typing "the sky is blue" a thousand thousand times...

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Good improv feels like doing trust falls with your own logic

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

There was a certain poetry in being rejected from The Onion's writing fellowship the same day that my favorite headline pitch showed up as a fully realized McSweeney's article—and from this poetry, there are two takeaways:

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

I want my WIPs to hear "clean cup, clean cup, move down, move down" and each shift one form over from where I'm writing it. Poems are now one-act plays. My dnd campaign is more my dissertation than my dissertation. Something in all this is secretly a tv show, but it's wearing a novel's hat...

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

Anyone else out here making up their own sub-rules for English? Not universal hard lines… just a handful of your own writing/texting conventions for that extra precise shade of language. First up— “Okay” should be used casually, like “au revoir,” while “ok” is reserved for “adieu” occasions.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

We need a recognizable symbol in charades for “I’ve given up trying to act out the plot…. but we have a personal connection to this film in our real lives that I must exploit, because it’s the only possible way for you to get this.”

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

The Mrs. Dalloway walk, except it's driving through California to every location Ally Beardsley claims the Dimension 20 cast filmed in at "3am in a warehouse"

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

For every week I'm not actively in an improv class, I grow ever closer to teaching my own literature classes as Harolds

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?" Takeaway: Henry James would have loved improv

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

Studying a rapport between the material and the virtual and knowing how, in the ways they remain tethered, they stand in mutual assurance, in defiance of oblivion... .... somehow makes it worse when streaming services decide to pull entire series from their catalogue, leaving no material anchor.

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Currently wondering what in my DnD campaign belongs behind the “playwall”… which persuasion attempts merit actual dice-rolling when my PCs keep making fitting (read: funny) points?

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Finally letting more than Orlando quotes speak for me... I'm an English PhD candidate finishing my dissertation on uneven material developments in modernist novels (hence the love for Orlando), interrogating how Victorian objects and structures linger amid modernist epiphanies. Returns! Tethering!

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Zoe Kempf-Harris @zozietropes.bsky.social · 01/01/2024

"'It is the goose!' Orlando cried. 'The wild goose...' And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight ..." Monday, the first of January, Two thousand and Twenty Four—when Virginia Woolf's Orlando entered the public domain. Happy Public Domain Day!

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