magistrate

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.

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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.

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.)

'cause I really love Eleventh Hour. (The British version, with Patrick Stewart. I hear that they're making an American version, and I really wish they'd stop doing that. The British version is fine, guys, it's just fine.)

1) It's a pretty bold genre. Billing itself as science-based rather than science-fiction, it aims to produce shows looking at scientific problems as they exist today.

This is HELLA COOL.

I'm a sci-fi junkie, from space opera/science fantasy all the way up to Dragon's Egg-style hard SF, and I still think this is hella cool. Or perhaps that's why I think this is hella cool. Of course, it's subject to the lensing effect where the more rigorous they try to me, the more sensitive I am to things that don't seem *quite* right, but it's a show that tries, at least, and manages to make running around after scientific things pretty gritty and gripping. How many of my nerd buttons don't get pressed, there?

2) It's adorably idealistic about science, even when it's being gritty with its dark lighting and its (quite good, actually) dramatic music and cinematography. The main character, Professor Ian Hood, will stop to explain scientific concepts to his bodyguard in a way that shows passion and respect for the field and isn't at all hokey. (Or maybe it's a little hokey. Any time you have someone stand there and exposit, it's hokey. But it's hokey in a way that makes me think that the writers, the actors, and their expected audience really want to know about this science and are eager to share it.

I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was adorably idealistic itself. It focused more often on social and political issues, but that sort of real care about real things in fiction is still my intellectual comfort food. (And then Star Trek slowly became less and less about the ideas and more and more about the franchise and the action, and... I died a little. But this! This is good! And I am grooving on it SO HARD right now!)

3) It's incredibly well put-together. I may complain about the official procedure and how a few of the incidental characters seem more useless/to know more than they should or that it really doesn't feel like appropriate precautions are being taken in this situation or that, but the plots are tightly-woven and well-layered and even if I can predict a twist or two, I feel rewarded. I caught two of the twists in episode 3 before, Kryptos, before they were revealed, and BOTH TIMES I reacted not with a groan but with a "You clever BASTARDS!". The ways in which plot elements are introduced and recur are an absolute joy to watch.

Add that with the direction, cinematography, and music, and WAH. I'm hooked. I love it. It's polished in exactly the ways I like it to be. (Though I will maintain that the lighting of the hospitals and clinics in the first episode was patently unrealistic, even if the visual effect was pretty nice.)

4) Patrick Stewart.

...what? I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'm pretty sure I said this. And I ♥ Patrick Stewart a great deal from those days.

I had a conversation with my brother once about people who got into arguments about things like how Sisko (Deep Space 9) could beat up Captain Picard (The Next Generation). But that was the thing. Picard never needed to beat up anyone. There were other options available to him.

I love that this is the kind of person Stewart plays. In Eleventh Hour, he's the scientist. Science is the Cause for which they fight, and it's that which leads to the resolution. Science is worth fighting for. It's worth drama. It's worth having a show made about it, and Stewart infuses that role not only with the high notes of passion and drama, but with the sort of presence that says he believes that, too. And... ♥. Just ♥. ♥ forever.