magistrate

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.

You know, I feel like I did this last year, too. Dove into the Write-a-thon with both feet, conveniently forgetting a few salient facts. In this year's case, the facts I overlooked are these:

1) The end of June is the end of the fiscal year for the University of Iowa, and I support and develop financial applications for the University; and

2) I'm going to spend just about every waking hour of next week in Laramie (or driving to and from Laramie) to learn about astronomy.

In short, I haven't had the time to work on fiction, nor will I.

But I have this week, and let's hope I can get something done this week.

What do we have up? *drumroll, please*

After The Land of Dragons

(A working title, which cribs too much from the excellent After the Dragon by Sarah Monette, which you should definitely read.)

It's a story about shattered communities, altered bodies, collateral damage, and unexploded landmines, except that the landmines are really dragon bits. Fun times!

( It's a thinly-scaled political allegory. And that was a horrible pun. )

I wrote the first draft of this for my Iowa City crit group, who unanimously told me that it needed to be a novel. I think that with a bit of tinkering and clarifying the arc and focus, I can make it work as a short story first. Let's see if I can, this week.

Oh, and have an excerpt, too!

( Excerpt under the cut. )


There's still time to sponsor me and help out an awesome workshop! Clarion West is supported by cool folks like you.

LiveJournal, for reasons known only to them, has begun stripping out any inline styles written into a tag using the style="" attribute.

This one really has me frothing at the mouth, partly because the RP I'm in (and have been for the better part of three years has always been a place to explore a lot of different modes of storytelling, and those modes extend to things like hiding easter eggs (links and whitetext) in the tags, playing with formatting to represent the mental state of characters, coding certain types of psychic activity to certain colors... even things as simple as letting a character scribble out what they've written. Basically, we've enjoyed playing with hypertext as a medium. The internet makes something that's only beginning to show its head in traditional literature (see, for example: House of Leaves) accessible, and it's been a great deal of fun channelling our assembled creativity into this.

Now, that's rendered impossible. Worse, the work we've already done has also been stripped of its styling. In some cases, the tags have degraded gracefully. In others, they've been rendered almost unreadable.

I've set up a side-by-side comparison of the styled and unstyled tags here: http://adravet.net/misc/btr_misc/stripped_css.html, and I've started a support ticket here: http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=1173954& as well as brought it up on a news post here: http://news.livejournal.com/130727.html?thread=91337895 .

I hope that this is a bug; or, if it was a deliberate choice on the part of the developers, that they can be persuaded to reverse it. For a service which advertises itself as a place to express yourself, this is a very disheartening occurrence.