Robin D. Laws's Blog, page 118

The Birds

The updated archive is here!

Oscar Predictions

I'm guessing that The King's Speech will nose past The Social Network for demographic reasons. Academy voters skew older than critics and even the various guilds. The King's Speech is a well-made movie in a familiar, comforting mode that ticks off lots of award-season boxes: literate, uplifting, period, English, performance-focused. The Social Network is some of these things, but it's compelling for elusive stylistic reasons. And plenty of Oscar voters view Facebook as part of a strange and frightening newfangled world.

Were I choosing what should win, my fave among the big contenders is True Grit.

Best Picture: The King's Speech
Directing: David Fincher
Actor: Colin Firth
Supporting Actor: Christian Bale

A big yet authentic-seeming performance from a movie star who hasn't won yet. If Geoffery Rush claims the statue, look for a King's Speech sweep.

Actress: Natalie Portman
Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo

For a while I was thinking that Helena Bonham Carter would take it because Amy Adams would split The Fighter vote. Now I'm moving back to the favorite choice. I've been a fan of Leo's since Homicide, so it would be great to see her recognized.

Animated Feature Film: Toy Story 3
Art Direction: Inception
Cinematography: Social Network
Costume Design: I Am Love

This movie is about nothing if not its costume design. A dark horse choice but I'm sticking with it.

Documentary (Feature): Exit through the Gift Shop
Film Editing: The Social Network
Foreign Language Film: In a Better World

Some great movies in this category, but voters have to prove they've shown up for screenings and are almost exclusively elderly. Reports have it that they were booing and walking out after seeing the brilliantly strange and disturbing Dogtooth, my favorite film to be nominated in any category this year. Incendies is more accessible but harrowing in its treatment of the Lebanese civil war. I haven't seen it, but I bet this crowd went for the drama about autism.

Makeup: Barney's Version
Music (Original Score): The King's Speech, Alexandre Desplat
Music (Original Song): "We Belong Together" from "Toy Story 3" Music and Lyric by Randy Newman

As usual, this category is a toughie because it's all slim pickings.

Sound Editing: Inception
Sound Mixing: Inception
Visual Effects: Inception
Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network
Original Screenplay: The King's Speech

The screenplay categories make it easy to split the difference between the two front-runners.

From here on out I'm flat-out guessing:

Documentary (Short Subject): "Strangers No More" Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon

Short Film (Animated): "Let's Pollute" Geefwee Boedoe

Short Film (Live Action): "The Confession" Tanel Toom

Pass the smoked trout and St. Agur...

Korad: From Culture To Ideology

Last week we cleared up a few basic issues before moving on to connect the dots between Koradi culture and the ideology that propelled them to imperial dominance.

As a voting collective, we decided that the Koradi culture is something unseen in human history—a militaristic ancient culture where both men and women are citizens, and serve in the army. 80% of voters took this option, as opposed to a male-only army (having already established that to be a citizen you have to serve).

In one sense we were boxed in by the citizenship restrictions, voted in during a prior round. I wonder how many of us saw the gender implications when that very clear and categorical statement went up for a vote.

The choice also testifies to the weight gamers give to erasing gender restrictions in their settings. The desire to make our imaginary world fun for players of both genders clearly took precedence over adherence to historical pattern. Treatment of gender roles is arguably the most fantastical element of today's pseudo-historical fantasy settings.

That decision paved the way for a second vote, on the basic social structure of Koradi society. With 30% of the vote, we chose an apparently patriarchal but secretly matriarchal set-up. For a real-world example of this structure, see the Iroquois Confederacy, where men met in public to ratify what was already decided by the women in public. This might feed into another fact about Koradi culture we decided earlier, that the distinction between public and private knowledge is in some way pivotal.

Let's review what we already established about the culture that gave rise to the empire:

Koradis believe that : 
1.) wisdom acknowledges the best idea no matter its origin. (34 votes)
2.) A woman who dies knowing unspoken truths has betrayed her daughters (33)
3.) Winter solstice is when the gods are taught new things. (32)
4.) A key distinction is made between public and private knowledge. (28)
5.) To outlive one's children is to fail. (28)
6.) Family lines are matrilineal, and socially very important. (24)
7.) Knowledge is good. Using it to attain power is better. (24)
8.) Marriage ceremonies end with the capture of the sacred goat. (23)
9.) Unused meat must be placed outside at night. (23)
10.) Education is more important than wealth or beauty. (23)
11.) Environmental obstacles are opportunities in disguise. (21)
12.) Military service is compulsory for all citizens. (21)
13.) Failure is the only route to success. (20)

The question before us today is how this all fit together to spawn an imperial ideology, and what that ideology consists of. Remember, this is the ideology that is on the verge of crumbling as the present day of our setting dawns.

Propose ideas on the nature of the imperial ideology in the comments below. Lately I've been imposing a discipline of brevity on pre-polling input. Now's the time to throw out suggestions however you see fit. Write at length, disagree with other posters, "yes and" or "yes but" them. If you were early off the starting block and began your spitballing last week, please remember to cut and paste those thoughts into the comments below.

Feel free also to speculate on the interactions between the other cultural traits. How do items 5 and 13 fit together, for example? Are they both proverbs, not to be taken literally in everyday life? Or it might be that you need to fail before you can succeed, but not that all failures are thought to herald good fortune. Please start a new thread for each of these peripheral questions. Thread headers will help here.

The only restrictions are these: discussion closes on Monday evening eastern time. To balance influence between keeners and more casual participants, limit yourself to three comments on the ideology question, and one comment (per issue) on any side matter.

When it's all over, ideas that seem to attract a consensus, or are allowed to stand without debate, will be treated as true. Controversial issues will be put up for a poll.

Diagramming The New Hero

Yesterday I unveiled the table of contests for The New Hero, Stone Skin Press' inaugural short fiction anthology.

As you might recall, Stone Skin is a brand new offshoot of Pelgrane Press. It is our mission to bring you exciting fiction that crosses genres and writing scenes. Our hope is that we can extend the community spirit we take for granted in the tabletop roleplaying scene to a distinctive and surprising fiction line.

Toward that end, I thought I'd take you behind the scenes a little bit for a look at the process of ordering the stories.

With The New Hero, I had an unusual luxury: we commissioned a follow-up volume at the same time. Volume Two will be our third release, after Shotguns v. Cthulhu. Most of the stories for that are also already in hand, and again I'm extremely pleased with the results.

One of my high-class problems in putting these books together is that the list of folks I'd like to work with is too long. Just the RPG folks alone could more than fill two books. Also we want to bring in select writers from the F/SF, literary and media worlds. Doing the two books at once gave me greater flexibility than I'd normally have in building an ideal balance of writers and stories.

In dividing stories between volumes I've had to make sure that both are equally impressive, but this part of the task proved unexpectedly easy. The overall quality of the work exceeded my expectations, sparing me the need to find unobtrusive slots for merely acceptable pieces.

Instead I found myself balancing by genre, and by writing scene. The New Hero books are based on a structural premise, not a generic one. Each concerns an iconic hero who is not changed by the world, but instead restores order and changes the world by remaining true to his or her essential values. (I've talked about this before on the blog and in Hamlet's Hit Points.

For example, contemporary supernatural stories proved very popular with writers. This is unsurprising, considering the heat surrounding this genre at the moment. Stories fitting this vibe had to be roughly divided between the two books.

Once I had the divisions down, I then had to determine the story order. That's where I got all charty. As is my wont, I dragged Profantasy's Campaign Cartographer kicking and screaming from its map-making function to serve my sinister diagram-making purposes. If you don't know it, it's a CAD based program that allows you to treat each item in a map or diagram as a separate unit, allowing you to easily move them around and transform them at needed. Its symbol function permits the easy import of symbols from PNG files. With this I was able to create images that served as quick visual reminders of the various considerations I had to balance while ordering the stories.



The factors, in addition to genre and writing scene, were:
narrative view (first or third person)
tense (past or present)
tone (up or downbeat)
story length
I also found that several of the stories shared broadly similar premises. Given that there are only so many distinct McGuffins that a hero can pursue, I don't see this as a problem—so long as they don't show up right next to one another.

On the chart, the symbols after the box listing the story, author and genres are view, tense, tone, premise, and length.

So that's a total of seven factors to consider in arranging fourteen stories for one anthology. I started knowing I want to slot certain stories into particular key locations. From there I juggled and rejuggled the remaining entries, seeking to distribute the rarer entries, throughout the book.

I imagine the process of ordering tracks for an album relies on a similar matrix of considerations: length, tempo, likely hits, distribution of voices for a band with multiple vocalists, and so on.

After all the prep, the eventual cascade of choices fell together quickly. Then came the final tinkering phase. It reminded me of picking film festival tickets at TIFF. As with TIFF, I can't imagine doing it without the chart.

The New Hero Roster

Stone Skin Press proudly unveils the table of contents for its upcoming short fiction anthology, The New Hero.

Ezekiel Saw the Wheel, Julia Bond Ellingboe
Better Off Not Knowing, Jeff Tidball
Warrior of the Sunrise, Maurice Broaddus
The Midnight Knight, Ed Greenwood
The Thirty-Ninth Labor of Reb Palache, Richard Dansky
On Her Majesty's Deep Space Service, Jonny Nexus
Cursebreaker: The Jikininki and the Japanese Jurist, Kyla Ward
Against the Air Pirates, Graeme Davis
Fangs and Formaldehyde, Monica Valentinelli
Bad Beat for Aaron Burr, Kenneth Hite
Charcuterie, Chuck Wendig
Sundown in Sorrow's Hollow, Monte Cook
A Man of Vice, Peter Freeman
The Captain, Adam Marek

This collection of stories unleashes writers from diverse writing scenes to tackle the timeless structure of the iconic hero story. This genre-spanning anthology will launch Stone Skin Press and its fiction line. Release date TBA.

The Birds

The updated archive is here!

Korad: Koradi Values 101

For the first time, last week's poll allowed participants to vote for as many choices as they liked. You used this freedom to select the central facts of Koradi culture. Of the 27 choices, those ranked in the top half, give or take, make the cut to become true. Rankings will also suggest relative importance. So, from most to least significant, here's what we know about the culture that gave rise to our empire.

Koradis believe that :
1.) wisdom acknowledges the best idea no matter its origin. (34 votes)
2.) A woman who dies knowing unspoken truths has betrayed her daughters (33)
3.) Winter solstice is when the gods are taught new things. (32)
4.) A key distinction is made between public and private knowledge. (28)
5.) To outlive one's children is to fail. (28)
6.) Family lines are matrilineal, and socially very important. (24)
7.) Knowledge is good. Using it to attain power is better. (24)
8.) Marriage ceremonies end with the capture of the sacred goat. (23)
9.) Unused meat must be placed outside at night. (23)
10.) Education is more important than wealth or beauty. (23)
11.) Environmental obstacles are opportunities in disguise. (21)
12.) Military service is compulsory for all citizens. (21)
13.) Failure is the only route to success. (20)

We have a society deeply bound up in questions of knowledge, truth, learning and wisdom. Items 1-4, and 7, 10 and probably 13 all refer to it. Koradis value information so deeply that they gift their gods with it. Item 1) suggests a meritocracy, or at least a culture that pays lip service to it. Certainly we have a scholarly and exploratory culture, as well as an expansionist one.

It is a polytheistic society, and a militaristic one. Its most important kernels of wisdom revolve around the question of failure—surely an overriding consideration for the Koradi. We have a nation of strivers on our hands—unsurprising given their imperial status.

It smacks very much of a culture a cadre of 21st century knowledge workers would collectively dream up. I hope you aren't going to be too bummed out when its ideology crumbles as Korad hits a historical inflection point.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Next week we'll conduct a free-for-all discussion to work out exactly how these values, beliefs and customs translate into a social and political structure, and the binding ideology that justifies it. But for the moment, let's clear up the simplest questions with a couple of quick polls.

Both will tell us about the gender expectations of the Koradi.

We know that Korad traces its family lines on a matrilineal basis. That often, but not always, tracks with matriarchal rule.

View Poll: #1706098

If the answer is no, Korad is a partiarchy with matrilineal family lines, and this next poll is ignored.

If the answer is yes:

View Poll: #1706099

Serpent's Skull / Plague of Light 6

The epic conclusion to "Plague of Light", my fiction serial set in Paizo's world of Golarion, appears in the likewise final installment of the Serpent's Skull adventure path. Take one final journey to the Mwangi Expanse as Xhasi, Arok, and the rest of the reluctantly aligned hero crew known as the Scarred Ones cope with the aftermath of a monstrous transformation... and uncover a jungle god's secret. Meanwhile, your PCs will have their confrontation with a decidedly different jungle deity, as they enter the Sanctum of the Serpent God. Now available in print and PDF.

The Confirmation Reveal

In stories, the most common pairing of information beats is the question and reveal. A question beat makes us, the audience, want to know something. A reveal gives us an answer to a previous question.

Horatio investigates a ghostly visitation on the battlements of Elsinore.
Question: What's going on?
Reveal: He sees that it resembles the late King Hamlet.

Horatio and the audience discover the information at the same time.

As is often the case, one reveal leads to another question: why has the king returned in ghostly form?

Questions create audience anxiety; answers relieve them. Questions are usually downbeats; reveals are often upbeats—or a mix of up and down, when the answer points us more toward fear than hope.

However, sometimes we feel relief when a character learns something we already know.

Dramatic irony exists in a story when the audience knows what the characters do not. From an omniscient narrator, or inherently objective camera, we might know that:

* the new girl Jack is wooing is actually his half-sister
* Remy is really the killer
* there's a bomb in a car

Dramatic irony is the hallmark of Hitchcockian suspense: fearing upcoming bad consequences is more powerful than being surprised by them.

The question for the audience in these situations is: when will the characters we identify with learn what they need to know? When they do learn, we feel relief—we have been released from the exquisite grasp of suspense.

In RPGs, the old school style was to maintain character subjectivity. You learned things only as your PCs did. Dramatic irony came in later, in games that allowed the separation of player and character knowledge. These beats happen all the time under this latter style. We feel anxiety when our characters know less than we do, and relief when our knowledge harmonizes back with theirs. Separation of player and character knowledge is thus usually a down beat, with harmonization its relieving up beat.

The Birds

The updated archive is here!