Marie Brennan's Blog, page 109

Dice Tales this week

If it weren’t for the fact that I had several already lined up and scheduled to go live, you probably wouldn’t have a Dice Tales post this week. But I did, so you do: “Ephemerality,” on the difficulty of recording the narrative text of the game, and what hoops you’d have to jump through if you tried.

Comment over there.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/780843.html. Comment here or there.

Brick by brick

More knowledgeable readers please correct me if I’m using this wrong, but I think the Jewish concept of tikkun olam may be the most succinct way of describing what I’m thinking about these days.

When I try to think about the situation of the world at large, I despair, because opportunities to make a large-scale difference don’t come along very often. We just had one; it went the wrong way. Many people have been saying we therefore need to look for other ways to improve the world, or at least to hold it together against the forces trying to crack it. Tikkun olam: repair of the world. Good deeds, acts of kindness, all the little ways we can each do our part, and maybe no single one of those things is that epic, but just because a good is small doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

For the foreseeable future, my intent is to make an open thread on the first of the month, inviting people to talk about the things they’ve done to repair the world and the things they intend to do. Anything good is worth mentioning: most of us can’t give a thousand dollars to an important charity every month (or even once), but helping your elderly neighbor with a strenuous bit of yardwork is more within reach. Donations, volunteering, even changes in your own life that aren’t so much about reaching out as about making yourself a better citizen of the world. I think it might be a comfort to read about the good things other people are doing, and maybe even an inspiration — “oh, huh, I never thought about doing X myself, but that’s a great idea” — plus, for myself at least, it’ll be a reminder to not just wish the world were in a better state, but to get off my duff and do something about it.

So consider this the first of those posts. My husband and I made two donations the other day, to the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council (we’re already members of the ACLU). I bought a Black Lives Matter t-shirt, not just as a public statement, and not just as a reminder to myself, but because the place I bought it from makes donations to some good charities. We also just had solar panels installed on our roof, doing our own itty-bitty part to move society toward renewable energy. In the upcoming weeks I’m intending to supply something to a local food drive and to ask around about volunteering for some kind of literacy or English proficiency program. Please use the comments on any iteration of this post to share your own efforts and to talk about what you might do going forward. Remember: nothing is too small. Anything you did to improve the world around you, I would be delighted to hear it.

Right now, we need those points of light in the darkness.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/780750.html. Comment here or there.

swan_tower @ 2016-11-09T08:11:00

I broke down crying last night.

Because I thought my country was better than this, and instead it proved itself to be worse. And it will go on getting worse, in ways big and small, because soon we will have a president and a legislature and a Supreme Court that do not care about the well-being of women or minorities or LGBTQ people or the environment or anything other than themselves, and because every small-minded reactionary bigot in the country has just had their bigotry validated on a nationwide scale. Because this is what the Republican Party has created, and the older generation who took a country that worked and systematically broke it, and the white citizens of the United States who fear the rest or else just don’t give enough of a damn — not every one of them, not without exception, but in the aggregate.

And I don’t know how to fix it. Because it can’t be fixed, not in any simple sense of the word. The best we can do is batten down the hatches, join hands with one another and achieve whatever good we can, however small. Not just for the next four years, but for a generation or more to come, because make no mistake: the damage from this will be lasting.

I don’t really know how we’re going to do that. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after that, I’ll be able to think about it.

Not today. Today, I don’t even know what to do with myself.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/780513.html. Comment here or there.

Dice Tales: You Had to Be There

I kind of wanted to make a political post today, but I can’t get past my rage at the FBI’s interference well enough to say anything articulate, so I’ll just leave it at:

GO VOTE.

And then I’ll go back to trying to think about anything that isn’t politics, which right now means linking you to the latest Dice Tales post, “You Had to Be There.” Why do RPGs often make for such bad anecdotes? And what can make a gaming anecdote good? Find out (and comment) over there!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/780236.html. Comment here or there.

reading and signing at Pandemonium in Cambridge, 11/5

For those of you in the general vicinity of Boston: I’ll be reading and signing at Pandemonium Books and Games in Central Square this upcoming Saturday at 7 p.m. I hope to see some of you there!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/779841.html. Comment here or there.

Dice Tales: reader request week

Last week’s Dice Tales post was “The Secret Life of Game Junkies,” discussing the ways that players keep the game going between sessions, but this week is something else: a call for reader requests. Dice Tales isn’t over, but it’s coming toward its end, so if there’s something you want to see me post about before it’s over, now’s your chance to say so!

As usual, comment over there.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/779623.html. Comment here or there.

Three things for the Halloween season

Pseudopod (Escape Artists’ horror-themed short fiction podcast) is running a Kickstarter to raise the funds to pay their narrators. I am not wholly a disinterested party in this, as I’ve narrated for them several times (without pay); but I will say that I wholeheartedly support the notion that the people who read you the stories in a podcast deserve to be paid for their work. They already compensate their authors well, so this is the next step, and I applaud them for taking it.

Also, don’t forget that you only have until the end of this month to purchase prints from my Autumn and Halloween galleries:

You can get them in practically any medium (paper, acrylic, metal, canvas, glass, wood) and any size, or a digital license for use as book covers etc.

Finally, I’m over at Unbound Worlds talking about the most influential book I’ve ever read. You have to know the book in question or the things it’s based on to understand why it’s Halloween-themed, but trust me, it is.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/779379.html. Comment here or there.

mythic boundary markers

Brainstorming time!

I’d like you all to tell me what objects you might, from a mythical standpoint, associate with the delineation of boundaries and borders. I’m looking specifically for objects that might be a personal possession; walls and fences are obvious boundary markers, as are rivers, but neither are really the sort of thing a person could carry around with them. A sword, on the other hand, being a thing that cuts, could be the thing that marks the division between Here and Not Here, whether by literally drawing a line in the dirt or just symbolically cleaving things apart.

Can you think of/make an argument for other personal-sized objects that might represent geographical boundaries?

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/779143.html. Comment here or there.

LIES AND PROPHECY and CHAINS AND MEMORY now in print!

It’s been a bit of a stealth launch up ’til now, but: I am pleased to announce that you can buy both Lies and Prophecy and its sequel Chains and Memory in trade paperback, from the following retailers:

Amazon: Lies and Prophecy , Chains and Memory
Barnes and Noble: Lies and Prophecy , Chains and Memory
Book Depository: Lies and Prophecy , Chains and Memory
IndieBound: Lies and Prophecy , Chains and Memory
Amazon (UK): Lies and Prophecy , Chains and Memory

I owe this state of affairs to the hard work of Leah Cutter, without whom I would not have had the first clue how to go about creating a print edition, much less done this good a job with it. I highly recommend her to anyone in need of a POD formatter; she does fantastic work. She also runs workshops, if you want to learn how to do it yourself.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/778951.html. Comment here or there.

Can anybody ID this statue?

This is something of a long shot, but let’s give it a try anyway.

The above picture is one my parents took in the Bavarian town of Oberammergau. My father uses it in a class he teaches, and I’m told that every time he does, somebody asks, “who’s that?” Who the statue depicts is irrelevant to the subject matter of the class, but people want to know anyway.

Problem is, my parents didn’t take a picture of the plaque below the statue (they didn’t expect it to be relevant), so they have no idea. Attempts to pop the shot into Google Image Search have helpfully informed them that it’s a picture of a statue; attempts to Google “bust in Oberammergau” and similar phrases have turned up nothing useful, even when attempted in German. So our last-ditch option is to post it here and see whether anybody can tell us who we’re looking at — possibly somebody equipped with more than Google Translate, who can conduct a more nuanced German-language search.

(No, they don’t remember where they were in Oberammergau when they took the picture, either. Otherwise I could attempt some magic with Google Street View.)

Any takers?

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/778587.html. Comment here or there.