magistrate | Entries tagged with entry: rambledansen

I have this memory from when I was a much younger magi. It was some school night, and my brother – two years older than me – was working through some math homework; probably very early algebra. I was curious and bounded over to see, and the problem was something very simple like a + 5 = 13, asking to solve for a.

I, with the assurance of an intelligent child who had not yet learned that being confidently wrong feels exactly like being correct, said "Oh, I know this! a is the first letter of the alphabet, so it has to be 1. So a plus 5... wait, that doesn't work!"

Either my mother or my brother then explained to me the concept of variables.

I immediately went "But if it can mean anything, then you never know anything!"

I was a child.

Later on, algebra turned out to be a subject I really enjoyed. It was just all puzzles! And calculus was also great, because it was just all advanced puzzles! (Geometry, I hated. It was just all proofs. But that's neither here nor there.) I don't remember the moment when that absolute incomprehension turned into clarity, but there had to have been n>0 of those moments somewhere.

I feel like I'm having a similar experience with Buddhist philosophy, of all things, right now.

( Read more... )

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.

There was a meme going around a while back where people could ask for three things to ramble about which they might or might not know or care anything about. And I asked for three things, thinking that this was a thing I might conceivably be able to do.

WELL, NOW I'M DOING IT.

Courtesy of

sholio...

1. Snow

Snow is very pretty right after it's fallen, but it does not love you.

I grew up in the Midwest, and I feel like I have some good memories of running around in the snow in those ridiculous puffy snow pants and insulated boots and a million layers of everything, and then coming back inside where it was warm and where mom had put towels in the dryer so they would be all heated up and fluffy for me to dry off with, and then we had hot chocolate or spiced cider (usually from those little packets) or something.

That childlike enjoyment is pretty much the total of my good feelings about snow. All the rest of it is shoveling driveways and scraping off cars and those days in the middle of winter when the universe has dumped a foot and a half of snow on everything and you've shoveled the walk like a dutiful citizen and then it gets above freezing during the day so the snow starts to melt and then it freezes again overnight so that all the meltwater solidifies into ice all over the sidewalks and then morning comes around and you have to walk to class but the entire city has turned into an ICY DEATH TRAP.

And then I moved to California, to a place where the winter temperature never drops below 40 (and if it does, the entire city thinks it's the end times), and I can rest assured that if ever a single snowflake is seen, the city will shut down, and I won't have to go to work.

Everywhere here still decorates their businesses with snowflakes and snowmen in the winter, though, which I find HILARIOUS.

2. The Telegraph

The most interesting thing I know about the telegraph is its role in a trans-atlantic police chase in 1910. Beyond that, now that I'm neck-deep in this RDR2 fic (taking place in an alternate 1907), I'm having fun working out how telegrams and trains affect the logistics of characters in three or four different places trying to communicate and keep each other updated on things. The pace of life in that era, from all my desultory and non-scholarly readings, is such a weird mix of delays much longer than we're accustomed to thinking of and rapid interconnection that completely upended society's ideas of time and distance.

Beyond that, Oakland and Berkley share a street called Telegraph Avenue, and San Francisco has a hill/neighborhood called Telegraph Hill, and it's a neat little intrusion of history into geography. As are so many things.

3. Sharks

Here's something I've been wondering about for a while: are sharks just extremely bad at digesting things? I ask because there seem to be more stories than one would expect about sharks eating some kind of evidence and then later being caught and cut open or vomiting up the evidence, with the evidence still intact enough to be used as evidence. The papers I can kinda understand – I don't know how well I would digest paper, either – but the human arm is meat, and you'd expect a shark to be pretty okay at breaking that down.

I'm not particularly afraid of sharks, because despite living in a coastal city I generally stay far away from their habitat, and if I did find myself in their habitat, I imagine my immediate concerns would skew more toward "hypothermia" and "drowning".

And there are my answers! If you would like me to give you three things to ramble about, feel free to leave a comment, and we'll see if I remember to respond.

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.

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?

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:

"Tom Lehrer - The Elements - LIVE FILM From Copenhagen in 1967" (Watch on YouTube)

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

"SFU Choir - Every Major's Terrible" (Watch on YouTube)

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:

"Modern Major General Grievous" (Watch on YouTube)

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.

You know, it took me until today to really put my finger on why I prefer a certain style* of asterisking/footnoting things in blog posts and web documents over another.

* That style being this one, in which the "footnote" is placed directly after the paragraph in which its asterisk appears.

It's because when reading a physical book, when I see a footnote, I can glance down to the bottom of the page and read the addendum. Even if the footnote occurs in the middle of a very long chapter, I can easily glance down and back up to my spot again because the chapter is formatted into discrete pages, the footnote is placed at the bottom of the page, and I can hold an entire page in my field of vision.

Internet texts, though, generally work with a long vertical scroll, and there's no convenient way of marking your position. (I usually resort to highlighting passages so that the highlight will catch my eye if I have to scroll away and scroll back up to find it.) Once you add in the fact that you often don't know where the footnotes will be, where the scrollbar is concerned – if you have a blog post with a large number of comments, for example, the end of the page is the end of the comment section, not the end of the post; finding the footnotes involves moving the scrollbar to some ill-defined middle point – you're either left with the hassle of scrolling/searching down and back up every time you encounter an asterisk (which I find really disruptive to my reading experience), or just encountering all the footnotes at the end, shorn of their context unless you want to go back up and search through the text to re-find them.

By contrast, placing the footnotes immediately after the paragraph in which their asterisk occurs doesn't interrupt the flow of the asterisked sentence, but it still places the additional information within the same field of view as its context.

Incidentally, this is also why I have a grudge against the term trans*, and refuse to use it to refer to myself**. ("trans," fine, though I prefer the specificity of "neutrois". "trans*," fuck no.) Because the first time I encountered it in a blog post, I spent several minutes looking for the footnote and becoming increasingly annoyed that I couldn't find it. Because while * is used as a wildcard character in certain contexts? In the context of writing out discussions on the internet, * has another, more-well-established meaning, and that's the promise of additional information to be fulfilled within the document, at some point following the *. When that promise isn't fulfilled, well, XKCD may have said it best.

** If you prefer that I use the term trans* to refer to you, I will, but I will also persist in thinking that it's an extremely poor piece of information design.

Anyway, there's no real point to this entry, except to note that the formal reasoning behind my gut preference finally snapped into place, and that was cool.

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.

sholio and I are testing out an accountability buddies setup, where we meet to talk writing shop, discuss goals, and analyze how well we're meeting them. (We're still in the first week, so neither of us have any idea how well it will work. But one of the best pieces of advice I got last year was "Failures are just experiments that yield negative results," so even if we find that this format doesn't work well, that's useful information! And I'm hopeful that it will work, and be awesome for both of us.)

The theme I want to engage with this year is of productivity, and constant storytelling: I want to be creating and putting out a lot more work than I do currently. Getting back to my Clarion West levels of a short story per week would be amazing, and the fact that I'm making my living off freelance stuff which doesn't eat as much time as a full-time job tips it into the realm of possibility. (If I could transition to making my money off writing, that would be incredible. I am looking into ways to start on that path, specifically through Patreon, but my ability to write and produce complete works on a consistent schedule is something of a prerequisite for that, so that's where I'm starting.)

The two goals I had for this week, to support my theme of producing lots of fiction, were:

1) To take a look at how I choose stories to work on, and

2) To take a look at how I go about moving stories through to completion.

( This is about how I work, which informs how I choose stuff to work on. )

( This is about how I choose stuff to work on. )

Holy crap, I think I've got a short story done in draft. (Well, "short"; it's roughly 6600 words long. One of these days I'll figure out* how to write at commonly-acceptable lengths like 3000-4500 words.) I think I started this one sometime in mid-November. Not a bad start to the year, even if I probably won't have it out the door today!

* This is probably a lie.

Over the past few days of trying to tie everything together, I've been thinking about a couple of things.

( Neepery on characters being afforded plausible choices. )

( Neepery on plots that dig deep and plots that go far. )

And on we go. I've been writing for as long as I can remember, publishing for... yikes, 2005 was nine years ago already, wasn't it? –and editing professionally for over a year, and I've been to one of the most prestigious writing workshops in the speculative fiction field, and I still often feel like I have no idea how fiction works or how to write something that functions. Then again, I hear that this never really goes away, so I'd best get comfortable with continually working to figure things out and put neat labels on the tools in my toolbox.

[ETA] Welp, I read over it, and I'm still not entirely happy with the arc – but I'm not sure what I can do to fix it without writing a different story. So I sent it out! Because if nothing else, starting the year on a submission has some nice symbolic heft, and it is sometimes the case that other people like my fiction more than I do after a long writing/tweaking process. &o.o&

There are just about 50 minutes left in January 1. I'm doing pretty well!

Yesterday, I had to walk to the Staples that's a few big blocks away, so that I could get things which would let me mail out important documents and holiday gifts. I wore my usual – a long-sleeve button-down shirt, with black jeans – and it was a bit cool, so I threw on a windbreaker.

Within a block I realized that I was overheating, so I took off the windbreaker.

Because this may be late December, but I am in California, and the terrible horrible frigid ice-hell of winter has not found me here.

...

Man, I kinda want to do one of those "year in review" things for 2013, because frankly, I feel like I deserve a medal for surviving this year with my sanity and shaded-cynical optimism intact. But I also feel like if I do that before the end of the year, 2013 will find some way to punish me for thinking it's over.

It's almost over. And I am going to drink hot tea out of my adorable 3-oz ceramic cups, and I am going to cherish the things and the people who got me through this year. And I am going to continue patiently laying groundwork to make tomorrow better than today.

And then I'm going to take a deep breath and work on my Yuletide story again, even though it scares me.

As an exercise, to try to ease my brain up out of its months-long stress-induced no-writing slump, I sat down and copied out the first sentence (or two; the first lines of If The Mountain Comes really don't work if you only take the first sentence) of all the short stories I've had published in various markets, and then grouped them by whether I (personally) thought they were engaging or not.

( Read more... )

In any case, it's something I don't think I'd really sat down to examine in any depth before, so now I can say I've done that. And hopefully have a better sense of how this particular mechanic works in the stories I write in the future.

I have tofu marinating in a mix of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, honey, fresh rosemary, crushed garlic, black pepper, and powdered lapsang souchong. We are going to make it into fresh rolls tonight. (With green tea soba noodles because I have no rice noodles.) It is going to be delicious.

(Speaking of fresh rolls, I recently learned about how the skins for them are traditionally made, and the process is, as Joe Pastry puts it, "so ingeniously odd".)

My random thought upon waking this morning was that it would be really cool to make some kind of virtual coffeeshop. I think this was partially inspired by Coffitivity, and also by a bunch of articles on how the people you interact with most frequently palpably impact your performance, and thinking about how to form communities and foster community interaction when people in those communities might not be able to easily meet in person. But the idea that's rolling around in the back of my head is something like this:

On its most basic level, it'd be a chat site. Something along the lines of IRC, but it would take place in a kind of basic, bare-bones virtual "space", even if the only way the virtual space came about was through terminology. Frex: people could join "tables", which would be the individual chat rooms. They could also create their own tables and invite their friends. There'd be general tables for topics like politics, writing (or, more specifically, politics by region, writing by genre), and you could create public or private tables. Public tables could have short descriptions of the people "sitting" there: "I'm a writer working on the script for my first webcomic." "I'm a programmer working on a mobile app." "I'm here to meet new people; I'm a 34-year-old queer man in the Tampa area, into HAM radio and industrial music." People could join open tables based on who they might find interesting to chat with. Tables could set with upper limits on the amount of "seating" available, or let in as many people as they wanted.
People would be able to put things "on the table" for everyone at that table to have access to: documents, links, etc.
It'd be cool to integrate some kind of background audio like Coffitivity. It'd also be cool to integrate graphic design which supported the general coffeeshop theme; background images, maybe even something like LJ's gifts system where for some minimal amount of money you could buy people pictures of drinks. (I'd have to investigate how little money would be effective - not a lot to spend, but still enough that whatever processing fees wouldn't completely eliminate whatever micropayment the coffeeshop got. Like, it'd be cool to offer a $.05 virtual drink because most people would not balk at buying that, but after Paypal or a credit card processor or whatever took its cut, would there be a micropayment left?)
It'd also be cool to integrate optional voice or video chats.
You could have a little curated store where you could order tea and coffee and such – I'm thinking something like an affiliate relationship with an established tea seller, so you'd literally be ordering, like, the Adagio or David's Teas or whatever products, but (if you found the right company) they's give a percentage back to the teashop to cover hosting costs. And then regular users who ordered from the virtual counter could make the tea/coffee at home, and chat to each other about what they ordered.
There could be paid levels of membership which would give you things like archived chats, lockers where you could store files, dedicated tables, etc?
It'd be cool to make this a space which could facilitate virtual classes. Virtual lectures. Virtual open mic nights! Virtual readings! Virtual streaming of live music from "local" artists! Opt-in, of course; other people in the coffeeshop might get a notification or a sidebar listing public events and they could choose to listen to them, but the advantage of a virtual coffeeshop is that if you walk in on open mic night, you can choose not to make the audio exist for you.
It'd be kinda cool to have graphics for your status: a "hard at work and concentrating" icon, a "social; come interact with me" icon, a "taking a break from working" icon, a "deep in a conversation, please don't bother me" icon. Ideally, really easy to switch from a dropdown, and it'd show both in the table chat and on the description of the table. (So if two people at a public table both set their icons to "deep in conversation", people might think twice about joining them?) Ideally, also, there'd be multiple sets of icons that you could choose from. This one is an elderly black man! This one is a young Latina with a lot of piercings! This one is a robot! Here are generic smilies!

Now, a lot of this exceeds my current development skills, and I have no idea whether I'll find the idea as cool by the time I've acquired the relevant skills. But I wanted to get the high-level ideas down just in case it did remain an awesome idea, and also in case any other programmers showed up and were like "I also want to make something like this! Let's set up a GitHub and start hacking!" 'cause, hey, I may look back at this at some point and go "Ooooh." Or I may decide to dive into this as soon as my current teaching-myself-java fun times are done.

ONE NEVER KNOWS.

So... I'm not in a great financial situation, right now. Unemployment that's dragging on longer than I'd like (though, really, any time at all is longer than I'd like), issues with the startup I left never generating revenue enough to pay me some of my wages, living in California, etc. I'm searching for a job, and I'm getting some pretty excellent interviews, but nothing's really taken, yet; I'm also doing freelance work, writing content, and looking into other ways of generating income on my own.

But. All of this takes energy, and motivation, and unemployment seems designed to sap both. So I've developed a framework to help move me through.

( Gods made to order, psychological and aspirational trickery, and the point of this post. )

And, for my own reference, an actual list of charities:

( We here in Vault City LOVE making lists. )

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. )

1. I've made a routine out of my commutes in the morning and evening. I have the good fortune to be located along the BART line at stations where I can generally get a seat going both ways; even during the morning rush, when by Oakland the trains are packed full, standing-room-only, I'm generally tucked into a seat by a window where the morning light (when there is morning light, rather than drifting fog or steady rain) can pour in on me. These days, when I've managed my energy well enough that I'm not completely exhausted, too tired to think, I read. It's a 45-minute ride each way, which clears out a precious hour and a half for me to sit down and devour books. Which is an unparalleled luxury, given how little I was able to read before I came out here.

( Little to do with reading. )

I like to personify my brain, partially as an Elizabeth Gilbert-esque control on getting too much ego tied up in things but mostly because it makes it easier to blame things on an entity external to myself. Like this, for example: if there is a choice between buckling down and working on one of the many, many concepts/story scraps I have lying around or coming up with a shiny new concept – usually novel-length, but not always – then it will take the "shiny new concept" option 11 times out of 10.

Anyway, it tossed me what may or may not be an urban fantasy Noir about a freelance detective gal who gets commissioned for some enigmatic person named North, and ends up having to navigate her own undeath. As well as her life, one universe over. And the one may not be more complicated than the other.

Here's the beginning my brain handed me:

I knew I was digging myself into it when I signed the contract. It's not like I couldn't see it coming; on the highway of life, this was the lane with the orange cones and the lit-up roadside sign saying THE BRIDGE IS OUT and the police lights and the oily smoke coming up. But, you know, if I'd had another option, I wouldn't have taken this one.

That's the way it always is.

I've also worked more on Rust City. You know, when I started it, I was pretty sure it would be a novella – but then it just kept growing. I only have about 8k words in it now, but given the way I structure things and how the scope is expanding (the love-fascination-need-triangle is now more of a connect-the-dots), I'd be surprised if the finished draft clocked in under 70 or 80k. Y'know, if it ever fights its way through the shiny new upstarts.

It's a wonder I've ever finished anything.

He drew up beside her. She was framed in the gristle of the building, the rebar and wire and crumbled cement like a nest around her. Across the city blocks, the Moonlit moon was glowing. Its light was softened by the distance, and softened Sela's face.

"You smell like him," Sela said.

Ferro looked at her, then ducked his head. Hoped that what he was about to say would be permissible. "How do you know what he smells like?"

Sela glanced at him askance. "You have to remember which one of us is the dog," she said.

[Semi-boilerplate text: As always, I hope you'll check out and support the Clarion West Write-a-thon (and me in particular, if you feel so inclined). Your donation will help a workshop which failed to teach me the fine art of controlling my wordcounts, but which did teach me many and varied other valuable things.]

So let's talk about Rust City.

Rust City began as a thought experiment as to whether or not I could write something Bizarro. (The verdict is: I couldn't. The closest I've ever come is probably The Relative Densities of Seawater and Blood, and it's not very bizarre, compared to anything, say, Carlton Mellick III has ever written. I think that in order to write Bizarro, you have to have the abilites (1)Not to take yourself so damn seriously, and (2)Let go of the need to explain or at least justify everything, and I score pretty badly on those rubrics.)

The story follows Ferro, a man with a condition that's given him the primary sex characteristics of an standard XX physiology but a standard set of XY secondary sex characteristics. He falls in with a pair of cousins named Wolf and Sela, who may or may not be genetically-engineered remnants of the war that screwed up the entire planet, either decades or centuries ago.

The full title of the project is Rust City (a love story), though I remain unsure of what the love story actually is. (Wolf and Sela have an extremely broken familial relationship they both want fixed but don't know how to fix, Wolf and Ferro sleep together, Ferro is fascinated and stalked by Sela, and for all this time Ferro is crushing on a woman named Kyoto who has burn scars covering most of her chest. There's a lot of thematic body stuff going on here, and it's all kind of a mess.)

Also, there are molemen, which aren't actually molemen. They're more like some kind of cavefish-esque offshoot of Homo sapiens who live in the old (but expanded) sewer system beneath the city. (I'm not sure that's better.) They communicate with Ferro by exploiting a trick of his synaesthesia – yes, Ferro also has synaesthesia, as well as hypertactility and haptophilia – which also has a tinge of the supernatural to it.

It's resisting being written, for the most part, because I honestly have no idea where it's going or why half the stuff is happening. You know, conventional wisdom says that you should have your story worked out before you start writing it. At least you should know what the major players and motivations will be. Possibly have some understanding of the plot. That's just not how I roll; I tend to slap stuff that sounds pretty on a page and hope that eventually my brain will start supplying all the connective tissue, musculature, and skeletal structure. Sometimes in that order.

But I wrote a slim 655 words on it last night, and now I'm sharing an excerpt with you!

He felt himself sailing down, through the floor, drawn toward the molten center of the world, but before he could come anywhere near it he was caught in a noise like spidersilk. It wrapped around him, twining through his pores in a rhythm like words.

They were words. Maybe not in a classical sense, but something intelligible without being sound. Something like,

(intruder)

And then, by more voices, closer to his skin,

(brightseer, sunfucker)

(up him)

(yeah)

(up)

[Semi-boilerplate text: As always, I hope you'll check out and support the Clarion West Write-a-thon (and me in particular, if you feel so inclined). Your donation will help a workshop which has supported real live Bizarro authors! And many, many others.]

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Having a perfectly dharmic time?
Having a perfectly normal time.
Three times magi remembered a meme (and one time they managed to complete it)
Martian Lady Merchant Space Opera
Four things make a post: The eclipse, ficwriting, eclectic spirituality, and meditation.
Detroit: Become Human
This is not what they mean by three-body problem.
I am the very arsenic alumi-practicality, and–
Sometimes, I think about footnote formatting.
Predicts, in parts
Writing process meta
Story formation and plausible choice meta
Winter reflections
First lines and general musing (sans firm conclusion or pointed instruction)
Fresh rolls and virtual coffeeshops
Suggestions for charities? Plus, neepery on applied ritual.
Culinary adventures, mostly without direction.
BART song
In which our intrepid author isn't making any progress.
In which our intrepid author doesn't know what se's doing. Much.

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