magistrate

Since my last post, I've spent a very stressful time trying unsuccessfully to launch a career change, discovered a number of new old new and exciting psychological landmines, gone through a number of bizarre interview processes involving all manner of new technologies, started a new job, been commended at a new job, entirely forgotten how to write, slowly rediscovered how to write, gotten hooked on both Inscryption and Crusader Kings 3, learned how to make some pretty bangin' meatballs, played my first board game in a long time (King of Tokyo!), acquired my first new card game in a long time (Muffin Time!), given actual people actual fanart of their actual characters (which was received far more appreciatively than its quality warranted), successfully climbed a bunch of walls (up to a 5.10C!), served on the admin team for a 6-month intensive workshop, dragged a hapless new friend into the wilds of 镇魂 / Guardian, accidentally started a dive into Buddhist philosophy, and started going through a number of trainings from The Consent Academy.

I still have not managed to drag anyone into playing Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes with me, but I have mostly memorized the NATO phonetic alphabet just in case. Also, I'm currently on a 3-game win streak for Blood on the Clocktower, which is pretty nice, because I think I racked up three wins total in 12-ish games last year before I got too overwhelmed with life to seek out additional social interaction.

I got a profoundly kind and moving comment on one of my scrappy, ridiculous unfinished braintics a while back, which nice because I had worked myself into a deep funk of the "I haven't put anything out in so long," and "why do I think anyone would be interested in the weird mishmash of stuff I scrape out of the bottom of my Id," and "all my stuff is so unfinished and might always be unfinished; where's the use in that?" varieties. Spontaneous validation that, no, sometimes some weird old unfinished idfic is just what someone out there needs... was a lovely little gift from the universe. Possibly I should make more of an effort to throw my ancient unfinished idfic out into the world. That follows, right? Sure. That follows.

As part of my re-training my brain to understand that words are things that we can, indeed, put together into sentences and paragraphs and chapters and narratives and the like, I'm taking a good run at finishing the currently-326,000-word RDR2 fanfic which was supposed to be 30K-40K long. My last update was in January of 2021. Fanfic readers are saints for putting up with this sort of nonsense.

I feel like it's the recurring theme of my life that I'll make a plan, whether a plan about a specific project or a plan for my next year or five years or for anything beyond a month, do considerable prep work, aim confidently for Point C, and arrive at Point थ. Point थ is frequently a perfectly fine point in its own right, but I do wish I knew the secret of the people who can actually accomplish what they set out to do, instead of just accumulating unrelated experiences like a drunken Katamari.

I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed bemused.

If you'd asked me half a week ago, when I'd first learned of it, what Blood on the Clocktower was, I'd have said it was basically a game of Mafia (or Werewolf) but overcomplicated to the point of catastrophe. That was when I first encountered it, wandering unprepared into a Twitch stream by someone who'd accidentally left their stream game listed as "Vampire Survivors", a relatively mindless swarm survival game where you just walk around an infinite map and attack hordes of monsters automatically.

If you asked me today, I would say that Blood on the Clocktower is basically a game of Mafia (or Werewolf) but overcomplicated to the point of UTTER HILARITY.

( Read more... )

In conclusion, I hated this game on sight, I was unable to escape its gravitational pull, and now I love it. And I both hate and love that I love it.

I have more thoughts on Blood on the Clocktower and ludo-narrative dissonance, but that has to go into its own post, because I've almost hit 2,000 words on this one.

I don't know how I got onto this thread.

( An Irish folk song. )

( A not-Irish not-folk song. )

That's it. That's my story. Please enjoy the wondrous adventures of Mittens, His Royal Floofiness, holder of the Key to the City of Wellington, New Zealand. Or, if you'd like sharper and more generalized cat exposure, please enjoy the best subreddit on Reddit and possibly the most important page on the internet, r/murdermittens.

As part of my ongoing brain lows, I seem to have two creative modes I'm resting in: I only want to re-read novels and not start reading anything new, and I want to worldbuild all the things and write scenes for absolutely nothing.

In my meanderings through all the random strange assortment of ebooks, I found myself reading two books very close back to back: Earthrise, by M.C.A. Hogarth, and The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers. These kinda form a genre in my head, of "human women from Mars having episodic adventures on a scrappy freelance ship with an interspecies crew, and also the books are very fandom-flavored, for lack of a better term". And I thought, hey, I wonder if I could take a stab at that?

One of my gripes regarding both books – which I do enjoy, in a popcorn sort of way: they're very satisfying at scratching a very particular itch, but also I don't get much more than that satisfaction out of them, and the skins get stuck in my teeth – is that the aliens never really feel properly alien to me. In Hogarth's universe, there's a reason; most of the species in her Alliance are essentially vanity genetic engineering projects that humans made, which slipped their leashes and ran off into the stars to become much more successful than humans did. So they're humanlike because they're explicitly gene-modded human/terrestrial stock. In Chambers' book, the species felt like aliens from Star Control II or Master Of Orion or something: kinda funny-hat aliens who operate mostly like humans do, except with some cosmetic cultural quirks.

(This isn't necessarily a critique. I grew up on SCII and MOO, and still love games like Stellaris, in which all the different alien species pretty much operate on the same principles with a few perks or handicaps. Also, keep reading.)

If I want to take a swing at doing a multispecies ship, I want aliens to be proper aliens! I started spinning out plans for a symbiotic plant-creature which lived in the ship's ventilation and air-processing, with whom granular communication isn't possible! I have a small cluster of psychic squirrel centipedes who only achieve human-level intelligence when there are multiple specimens in proximity, and whose homeworld population is one massive composite consciousness across which ideas pass like weather phenomena! I want Sol-system humans who are markedly different from other human stock which flung itself across the galaxy and dove headlong into gene-modding and nanite augmentation which eventually exceeded their ability to sustain! I want species to have such different nutritional needs that it makes having a shared meal difficult! I want them to cognize differently! I want them to have outlooks and ethics and visceral reactions to things which are even less mutually intelligible than American liberals and conservatives!

And I flung myself into worldbuilding, and then I thought about what actual scenes would look like, and I hit upon a truth I perhaps should have considered earlier:

If your whole genre is about a scrappy found family traveling the stars, relentlessly pounding the "aliens should be alien and difficult to relate to" button works counter to your stated goals. Also, I feel like this genre is supposed to be fun, not strenuous mental exercise or a Crossfit to train your empathy.

Humans like breaking bread together, and if you're writing for a human audience, it's nice to give them a crew that can break bread together. Sure, you can find new modes of intimacy which can cross species gaps – we do that, even today, when we're dealing with nonhuman intelligences which share our evolutionary context (see also: dogs, cats, parakeets), and I love me some good xenofiction which explores this sort of thing. But I'm not sure that sort of keenly-observed xenofiction is a great taste which tastes great with the fun easy rollicking adventure of an Earthrise or a Star Control II.

I dunno. Maybe someone will, or already has, proved that they meld exquisitely well. In the mean time, though, I need to go re-think the underlying ethos of this space opera I will probably not actually write.

If you're looking for a place to stream some superb owls, Explore.org came through for me. As I type this, they're streaming some long-eared owls. They're so floofy! And their little faces are so iconic!

/r/Superbowl is an entire subreddit for all your superb owl needs.

The National Geographic and The New York Times feel the need to ruin the joke in the lede, but at least the National Geographic actually goes on to deliver up owl-related content. The Atlantic blows both of them out of the water with a gorgeous photoessay.



Meanwhile, Today.com offers some sports-related news of some sort.

A while ago, I watched Markiplier play Presentable Liberty, which is quite possibly the worst-constructed game I've ever seen. The graphics are (I think intentionally) terrible, the sound design is generic at best, the writing is clunky and heavy-handed, the gameplay looks excruciating (and is at times so incredibly boring that Markiplier just cuts it out of the video entirely), the plot is entirely composed of plotholes (which the game mechanics actively make worse) and hackneyed, obvious tropes, and...

...and despite all of this, Markiplier finds it – and I find it, watching Markiplier – an inescapably affecting experience.

So anyway, a bit ago, I followed rionaleonhart into Detroit: Become Human fandom-adjacency, because Riona is an excellent person to vicariously experience fandoms through. And... okay, Detroit: Become Human is not as bad as Presentable Liberty. Or possibly it's worse, because it reaches higher and thus has farther to fall.

Unlike Presentable Liberty, it's extremely well-executed. The graphics are good, the acting is good, the branching decision trees and their effects on the narrative are ambitious (though the game still looks extremely railroady at points), the soundtracks – three soundtracks, one for each playable character – are utterly gorgeous, the characters are frequently engaging, the environments are frequently lovely, much of the scene choreography is captivating and moving, the script... has numerous, numerous issues, but also frequent sparks of excellence, and...

Aaand the plot is made of plotholes, and structured upon a thematic scaffold which pokes through the skin of the story like a horrifically broken set of bones, in a way that's really quite excruciating to see.

( If you don't see where this is going, you may lack familiarity with my fandom habits. )

All in all, Detroit: Become Human is a game which raises fascinating questions, then fails to answer any of them. And then attempts to engage with questions which its worldbuilding consistently fails to support. I hate it, I love it, I desperately wish it were better, and because I am me and potentia is potentia, I seem to have been bitten hard by the braintic bug. Goddamnit.

...but that may be an entirely separate post.

Because definitely what I need is more webapp ideas that I don't have time to develop.



Anyway, following on from a Twitter conversation, I'm wondering how it would work to make a writing program which could track the genders of a number of characters and then arbitrarily shuffle them. What I'm picturing is, simplified, something like this:

• At the top of the document are a number of fields which ask for a character name (or a list of character references, such as name and nickname and other variations) and pairs the name with a gender (and its associated set of pronouns).

• Each character you add is arbitrarily assigned a color (or icon or other distinguishing visual marker).

• As you type, a parser will keep track of which name (or referent) has been typed last for each of the original genders. When you type a pronoun, it will look at the last character reference matching that pronoun's set, and highlight the pronoun (or assign it the correct icon) to associate it with the specific character. It'll also have some kind of (mouseover?) menu to allow users to correct its assumption about which character it refers to.

• When you finish writing, each pronoun will be associated with a character. So you can hit a shuffle button, and then the characters' genders will be shuffled, and each pronoun can be brought back into compliance with the character's gender.

Needless to say, this would fail in a lot of situations. Take, for example:

• Dialogue. "He's not coming today," he said. (I mean, I guess I could set up a sub-parser which kept track of the last character reference inside a set of quotes?)

• Ambiguiety. We'll just call this the Randall Munroe exploit. I guess people would just have to make close, personal friends with the drop-down menus?

• Gay porn. I am reliably informed by people who have tried to write gay porn that pronouns are a nightmare anyway. And humans are better at parsing language than computers are.

• Unexpected cases. Language is complicated, yo!

I feel like there should be a way to handle this, and that it probably involves algorithms. I'm a bit worried that trying to write a general-purpose pronoun shuffler would actually require re-inventing Google Translate. Any computational linguists out there who want to point out things I'm missing?

I'm not going to get to this right now, and probably won't get to this today, so this is just a note so I remember:

It would be pretty neat to have a calender generator on my fun pages. I.E., it takes a random list (like the Bingo generator), but instead of telling it the dimensions of a bingo card, you tell it a month and year, and it'll generate a calendar of prompts for you.

Advanced options would include turning off certain days (so, setting Sundays to have no prompts, for example), or turning certain days to certain prompts (so, setting Fridays to "wild card" days, or something). Probably not granular "I want the 15th to be this topic, and the 18th to be this topic, and take off the 12th", because at that point you're... not doing random generation any more.

It'd also be really nice to tie the random sets generator into it, like I did with the bingo generator: you can load response sets into it, and get cards like this one. So, you could set up something to generate random sets of a person, in a place, with a problem, and assign each of those to a day. Etc.

:|a

I mentioned this over at allbingo, but I'm working on a bunch of challenges to get me thinking about short-form plot. Basically, I'm taking the following plot structures:

( Four structures below the cut. )

...three of which I found discussed at Philip Brewer's blog, and one of which I put together after thinking about successful short stories on my own.

I'm trying to take these structures and write extremely short stories/synopses with them – using one sentence for each point in the list.

I'm also finding it surprisingly difficult.

But I figured that while I was striving and trying new things, I might as well put the results up for people to see (and quite possibly best :P ). Just to keep things organized in this post, the card I'm using is below, and I'll link my fills for the squares.

( Card below the cut. )

Today, in an effort to avoid actually writing anything (because writing is scary), I programmed functionality into my demographics/random sets generator which let you import comma-delimited lists of values. This, combined with the option I worked up a while ago which let you import random sets from the demographics generator into the bingo generator, means that I can do wacky stuff like working up a bingo card with a bunch of randomly-generated sets of things like fandom, trope, and wordcount. See below:

( I sound my fearsome procrastination across the land. )

Now, the demographics generator (unlike the bingo generator) is still in alpha, is desperately ugly, and lacks a ton of stuff that would make it easier to use – like, say, paging down to show you that your options have, in fact, been added when you click the button in the comma-delimited list options. That's because I'm a back-end developer by trade, and just getting jQuery to play nicely enough that it would import the comma-delimited list in the first place meant an hour of hand-to-hand coding. Nicer stuff will happen later, once my urge to procrastinate on writing exceeds my frustration with front-end technologies again.

But, you know, if this sort of challenge appeals to you, there's now a clunky interface on my site that allows you to set up bingo cards like this.

In other news, today I have learned that jQuery does not like passing data out of its AJAX scope, and that you have to tell it not to run its AJAX asynchronously if you actually want to provide its information to another part of your script. Even if that part of the script comes after the AJAX call. ...I feel like that one, I should have known.