magistrate

LUDO-NARRATIVE DISSONANCE.

...part of the reason (not all of the reason) it's taken me so long to get around to this is that I don't really know what point I'm trying to make. None of this is intended as a criticism of Blood on the Clocktower; I don't think that a cohesive internal narrative would make the game better at what it's trying to be, and I don't think it suffers from not leaning into a narrative aspect.

That said, my confusion about where the narrative balance lay was one of the things that frustrated me and turned me off of the game when I first encountered it. Is that a problem, per se?

( Thinking about thinking about the topic. )

( Are were there? Have we arrived? Have we finally reached... THE POINT? )

In conclusion, I suppose, I hope that if any of you choose to check out the game, you do so with some understanding of what it is and isn't trying to accomplish. And if you want to start watching other people play, in the name of comprehension please start watching a session from the beginning.

Good Twin: It's okay. See... we can do this. We can just be buds.

Evil Twin: Yeah. We can be buds. Buds who want each other dead.

Good Twin: Yeah. Exactly.

Some initial notes before I get into my next Blood on the Clocktower ramble (see Part 1 here for context):

( Experimental ethics, in-person games, a bad idea, and a ship that ain't sunk. )

ANYWAY. I had thoughts about ludo-narrative dissonance, and I was going to type up thoughts about ludo-narrative dissonance, but now I'm almost two thousand words into a post AGAIN and I have yet to define even the term! So that post is still going to wait for another day!

But ludo-narrative dissonance is when your game mechanics or gameplay work counter to the story you're trying to tell in the narrative component of a game, which I feel like I flirted with in the fourth point anyway. So there's your definition. You're welcome.

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.

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.

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.

• Singing sand dunes (YouTube link; auto-sound)
• Ringing rocks
• Cave chimes (MyNoise link; auto-sound)
• Liar Rocks

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.

•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!

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.

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. )