magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
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.
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
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.
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
One thing I enjoy is fictional spaces – especially those limited, self-contained and set-aside-from-public-life spaces – that have a distinct sense of character and life to them. The Hub in Torchwood, for example, or the SID Headquarters from 镇魂 | Guardian. (Or even, if I think about it, the Taskmaster House and caravan from Taskmaster. Always check the shed.*) In computer games, too, I often gravitate toward places where I can create and maintain a self-contained but complex and multifunctional space: building elaborate solar-powered scavenger havens in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or a walled garden rife with advanced automation in the Minecraft: Crash Landing modpack. And some games come with those complex, palpable places premade: the gang hideouts from Red Dead Redemption II come to mind, with their individual quirks and personalities and the implied stories in how they're organized and arranged.

*To be said to the tone of Always Read The Plaque.

My sense is that this is something easier to do richly and immersively in visual media like TV shows and video games, because so much of how we interact with a space is visual and movement-based. (And tactile, but I don't consume that much tactile media. I suppose I could start going to escape rooms?) But I'm sure it can and has been done in prose fiction.

In trying to think of examples in fiction, I didn't, initially, come up with any – but, to be fair, it's not something I'm in the habit of reading for. Thinking a bit longer on the topic, I thought of Redwall Abbey from the Redwall series, and the rabbits' warren from Watership Down, both of which I read a long time ago.

Does anyone have examples in books or short stories that they've found particularly effective? I'd love to see how people approach the task.
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
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.
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
Current media consumption:

- CohhCarnage's Let's Play of Red Dead Redemption 2

- The Better Angels of our Nature, by Steven Pinker

- This thread on how environment influences human-available nutrition, by [twitter.com profile] SarahTaber_bww

- Aloha Ke Akua by Nahko and Medicine For The People, on loop, forever

Current mood:

- I want to write an epiclong sprawlingbigplotfic set in a post-Fall-Of-Rome (ish) Wild West (ish) world with dangerous residual magic (yes) animal shapeshifters (ish) and coordinated Recivilization Efforts (yes) and themes of sacrifice and betrayal and loyalty and deception and ecological symbiosis vs exploitation (yes, many). And capaill uisce (ish). And femslash (absolutely and unambiguously).

Current mood (addendum):

- I AM GOING TO FINISH AT LEAST ONE PROJECT IN 2019 SO HELP ME GOD
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
On the topic of not-rocks, when I was growing up, I had a cassette tape that had a bunch of folk tales on it. One of them (if I remember correctly, which I very well may not) had to do with a king who was sick, and sent his three sons out looking for a magical cure. Two of the sons get bored of the quest and quit; the third actually found the cure and was bringing it back when his brothers found him, killed him, buried him, and took the cure home to claim the reward. But reeds grew where the good son had been buried, and someone cut the reeds and made a pan flute, and when the pan flute was played, it sang about the brother's death in his voice.

I mostly remember it because the song was creepy and got stuck in my head a lot.  I have never been able to successfully Google the story or its audio.  I really wish I could find it again, though, because nostalgia.
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
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?
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
AAAAAAH FUCK, I WAS ALREADY NEVER GOING TO START SMOKING, BUT I AM NEVER GOING TO START SMOKING



Way to prey on my powerful and mostly baseless* dread horror of radiation, Veritasium.

*Not to say that radiation isn't norrifying, but I'm unlikely to be in a situation in my life where it's actually a present danger to me.

Though now I want to write a story (very) loosely inspired by the firefighters at Chernobyl. ;_;
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
Somehow, I got into a hole where I just keep listening to songs set to the tune of "A Modern Major-General". I'm pretty sure the Elements Song is to blame:



...but that transitioned quickly into "Every Major's Terrible":



Which I really want to memorize, some day. Well, I want to memorize both of these, really. ("And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium" is too much fun to say. Try it!)

So, I finally decided to look up the actual song, as it's been a long time since I've heard it, and that led me to this video:



And now, despite not remembering enough of the new Star Wars movies to even remember who Grievous is, I want to see fic based on this vid where he and young Obi-Wan are goofy buddy movie partners. Challenging each other to singing and swashbuckling contests.

...

...I'm sure there's a lesson I could draw out of the Tom Lehrer video; you can see that he stumbles on "molybdenum" a little (and really, wouldn't you?), but he doesn't get hung up on it; he just sweeps it behind him and moves on. Good life lesson. Which I will not be making any more eloquent than that.

And with that, good night.
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
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
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
I need to keel over and go to sleep soon, so I'll answer a couple of short questions.


[personal profile] thebaconfat: What is the weirdest file currently on your computer (that you didn't create yourself)?


...I am not sure I can answer this! I don't keep track of that many files I haven't created, as I assume that most of them are things like application config files and stuff. If stuff I've downloaded doesn't count as stuff I've created, I... still am not sure. But I do have a version of "Down Under" sung by a bunch of potentially-drunk Russians.



[personal profile] squeemu: What is the weirdest file currently on your computer that you did create?


I once discovered a file named temp.rtf in one of my fiction draft folders which consisted of 2391 words of Lorem Ipsum, closed with the line "And as it turned out, THEY WERE ALL BEES!!"


This post has been brought to you as a service of the December Posting Meme.
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
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.
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)

•cackles madly•

Bingo card under the cut. )

Yep, workin' on a system to port the random sets from the Demographics Generator over into the Bingo Card Generator. Next up may just be allowing users to load comma-separated lists into the demographics generator as option sets. And then I may port over the Bingo lists to serve as premade comma-separated lists to load into the option sets. ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR!

magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
I want to see a dense-packed dystopian urban setting... surrounded by incredibly lush, dense wilderness. As in, the reason that everything is piled up on top of everything else and people are living stacked like cords of wood isn't because they've destroyed everything and their cities have taken over the world like a bacterial culture, it's that the rest of the world is too damn poisonous and too fast-growing and too interested in cracking open your buggies and eating the nummy human interiors for anything to survive outside of these narrow strips of otherwise-dead land. (I imagine that'd be the way you'd answer the question of how you'd get enough resources in the first place to build a dense urban setting: you're in the equivalent of the Atacama or the Dry Valleys or something, only with bonus high concentrations of minable minerals.)

I have not thought through the logistics, here. I came up with this idea about two minutes ago.

In other news, I recently learned that the Sahara was a fertile region up until about 3000 BCE, and that is immensely cool.
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
Sometimes I'm reading along, and I'll hit a word – usually a really common word – that I've never thought of in terms of etymology before (usually because it's a really common word, and thus kinda invisible in my day-to-day goings-about), and encountering it in a new context makes the etymology just... click into place for me, and it's like I've uncovered a new nugget of meaning and a secret pedigree, and it makes me really happy.

Frex: I'm reading the astronomy textbook I got from Launchpad. I come across this passage:

Evidence that asteroids and comets really are leftover planetesimals comes from analysis of meteorites, spacecraft visits to comets and asteroids, and computer simulations of solar system formation. The nebular theory actually predicts he existence of both the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt—a prediction first made in the 1950s. Thus, the discoveries, beginning in the 1990s, of numerous objects orbiting in the Kuiper Belt represent a triumph for the nebular theory.


(Emphasis is the book's.)

My mind caught on the use of that first predicts. Looking at it stylistically, I first thought it should have been predicted, so I started testing my assumptions to see if I still thought they were correct. I thought about the word predates, and how that could be used in present tense and I'd have no issue with it. So, I took a closer look at predict – something I'd never been prompted to break down before.

pre, before. dict, from the same roots as dictate, dictum. I didn't have a Latin dictionary (dictionary!) at hand, so I didn't look up the exact meaning – but I had enough grounding at that point that my concerns were washed away. Dict; an authoritative or forceful assertion. A pre-dictum. The science dictates that it shall be so, and (in this case) it is revealed that it is so. How fabulous. A much more forceful etymology. Gleaming little declarative bones in a soft skin of supposition.

Moments like this make me love linguistics.
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
I made a bingo generator!

...okay, this is nothing which does not already exist on the internet, but I was bored and I wanted to build it. I plan on adding functionality that will pre-load lists of things like tropes, kinks, genres, dramatic situations, etc; problem is, first I have to generate those lists, or find someone who's already generated them who'll let me use them. XD

At some point, I may also add support for 3x3, 7x7, even 9x9 grids, and other fancy stuff like that. Maybe even styling. In the mean time, if you find yourself desperately needing a Bingo card this Holiday season and unwilling to google a generator, here you go! Let me know if you see any bugs. ;)

[ETA] And then I made a nice comma-separated list of These classic dramatic situations, which I don't really see a lot of people using, but which could be used! Mostly as a proof of concept. But, you know, concept proved!
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
So, Demonology! It's this universe I want to write in. Specifically, it's a universe I want to experiment with free fiction in. If you want to leave me prompts for the themes below, or questions which can be answered in prompts for the themes below, you go right ahead! The idea here is to get me writing.

I'll link the prompts below to their completed stories as I finish them, and add a (...) to ones whose fills I'm working on.

This is a table. It's a magical table. )
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
Trauma is a surgical disease. It is cured with bright lights and cold steel.


I can't remember where, when, or how I first came across a series of posts on Making Light called Trauma and You, but I am forever glad I did.

Trauma and You, despite its CYA-ish disclaimer (I am not a physician. I can neither diagnose nor prescribe. These posts are presented for entertainment purposes only. Nothing here is meant to be advice for your particular condition or situation.) does a pretty good job of walking you through a trauma scene – what you're going to see, what's going on behind the scenes (or under the skin), and what you should be doing about it. It provides mnemonics, statistics, and instructions, and if you're the kind of person who likes doing terrible things to your characters and having them patch themselves or each other up, it's a really great reference on how they should be going about that "patching up" thing.

But I think half the reason I keep coming back to it is that, even though some of the medical conditions described are enough to make your skin crawl (there was a meta-blog post elsewhere on the site, wherein one of the posters summed up the author's usual contributions as Long, bloodcurdlingly detailed advice from James D. Macdonald about what to do in event of some dire emergency (heart stops, house floods, leg falls off, children attacked by whale, etc.) Posters stunned into silence. Long, contemplative pause as commenters look thoughtfully at own houses, children, legs, etc. Timid, Piglet-like question. Terrifyingly learned and hope-destroying reply.), the post is often just fun, in a snappy, sardonic, and... occasionally hope-destroying way. Because you get advice like the ever-quotable [...]make sure the scene is safe. There is something over there that munches people. You are a people. Don’t get munched yourself. If you do get munched what you’ve accomplished is this: you’ve incremented the patient count by one and simultaneously you’ve decreased the responder count by one. On a scale from good to bad this is bad. Or the sheer pragmatism of When you’re dealing with trauma, your life is pretty easy. You have 1) Things that’ll kill your patient in the next five minutes, 2) Things that’ll kill your patient in the next hour, 3) Things that’ll kill your patient today, and 4) Things that you don’t really care about.

Trauma and You is broken up into five informative posts, with a couple of Final Exams at the end:

  1. The Basics. So, what’s trauma? It’s the physical world impinging on your tender body. Not to be confused with biology happening (in the form of bugs and germs), or chemicals (poisons, overdoses) happening, or your body breaking down and wearing out and going mysteriously wrong. No, this is more the Force of Gravity sort of stuff.

  2. Shock. Now it’s time to have our little chat about shock. Shock is what kills people. Shock, dear friends, is what will eventually kill you, personally. The only question will be how you got into shock to start with.

  3. Sticks and Stones. You can have a lot of fun memorizing bone names. (For example, the mnemonic for the bones in the wrist is “Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can’t Handle” for Scaphoid, Lunate, Triquetium, Pisiform, Trapezium, Trapezoid, Capitate, Hamate. (You can have even more fun memorizing the names and functions of the twelve cranial nerves, but that’s for another post.)

  4. The Squishy Bits. When crush injuries were first identified (in the trenches of WWI and the London Blitz of WWII) they ran around 90% fatal. Nowadays with fast and efficient EMS they’re down to 50% fatal.

  5. Burns. The amount of smoke inhaled is the number one predictor of mortality in burn injuries, way ahead of the age of the patient or the surface area of the burn. Continue to be suspicious with someone who has escaped from a fire. Sometimes the symptoms of smoke inhalation don’t appear for hours or days.


While I usually have to consult additional resources for various fictional traumas – like this shockingly relevant article on gunshot wounds to the chest, one of my major pieces of research for Misfire – and while I have no illusions that I get everything right when I do write about trauma, the Trauma and You series is almost always my first click, and I know there's a level of verisimilitude in my writing that wouldn't be there without it. Highly recommended.

Also highly recommended: a strong stomach when it comes to various traumatic medical things. Like amputation. And degloving.

Seriously, though, I could have gone my entire life without learning about degloving.

(Crossposted to my fandom journal.)
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
Finally got around to making carrot soup tonight, which was a process which started quite some time ago when I came home with ~2 pounds of carrots and a white onion, which progressed through soaking some chickpeas and then simmering them with a sprig of rosemary, and which culminated in me staring at this recipe for a while, then going "Fuck it" and making something up as I went along.

FUCK YOU I'M A CAT, basically. Except I'm only metaphorically a cat. Because cats don't cook. They have people to do that for them. )

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