Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 15

Blue Stars in the Inbox

I star all the subs I have open in blue, and for the first time in a while, I sent out four things today.  Now I just need to finish a couple more and send them.  Also get to work on that fecking book. RAR.

Whatever Else Happens, What is Important is This:

13 Children got taken to the war.  Of them, 5 lived to be turned into weapons.  2 of them survived the war and 1 boy mothered an abomination.

Livejournal is Annoying me

I cannot seem to comment on anyone else' entries. 

Liftoff! The Other Half of the Sky

Originally posted by helivoy at Liftoff! The Other Half of the Sky

Today is the day! Spread the word, our anthology is spreading its wings. Relevant sites:

Candlemark & Gleam direct sales
Reviews, interviews
Goodreads

The book, both print and digital, is available on all major online venues (Amazon, B&N, etc) but our publisher combines the print version with a DRM-free bundle. More direct sales also make it likelier that we'll break even.

Library Journal called The Other Half of the Sky "fearless writing... exciting storytelling". I'm already dreaming a successor to it -- an SF story collection with women scientists and engineers as protagonists. I even have a provisional title for it!

"...for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die."


The Other Half of the Sky cover: Eleni Tsami

The Dream-Cull

A misinterpretation gives the misinterpreter the skills and personality of a pirate movie swashbuckler, which exists as a red potion in a crystal bottle.

One person, continuously reborn as a sacrifice in a ritual to a god.  His blood runs into the pit out of which he is born.

One person, split lengthwise with an axe; each half is forced to ride a different horse.  The left half rides a red horse and the right half rides a yellow horse.

There were other permutations on the logistics of sacrifice.  I'm going to have to see if I remember them.

Public Domain Treasures . . .

Originally posted by sartorias at Public Domain Treasures . . .The Public Domain Review is trying to raise a fairly modest amount as their grant ran out.

I don't know if you've discovered this site, but it is amazing. Like, take a look on the left-hand side. Victorian slang! The main reason I can't read most steampunk is because they screw up the language so much that I can't get into their world. Like Gail Carriger, in the latest one, which I opened and glanced at a page. Someone snobby accused someone else of being declasse. No! They would not have said that then! Using declasse was declasse! They would have said 'vulgar.'So I get popped right out of the story and back into my reading chair. How I wish she would leave history behind and write something contemporary, or fantasy, or sf, because I know she's a terrific storyteller, and I want to be able to wrap the world of the story around me.

Anyway, here in this dikker are not only expressions you find in Dickens and Thackeray, etc, but explanations. Are they correct? Who knows, but it makes for insightful reading of how language was viewed in 1870.

Anyway, if you have a loose fiver, toss it their way!

Submissions to Not One of Us

Originally posted by asakiyume at Submissions to Not One of Us






Here I'm rebroadcasting sovay 's repost of lesser_celery , the editor of Not One of Us. It really is an excellent magazine.

This is just to signal-boost lesser_celery's recent post: Not One of Us aten't dead, it just had a website glitch for a week. Please re-send all submissions or queries from April 9th through 16th. And then send work no matter what, because they are an excellent magazine.

The Beast Fears Fire - Escape from Lahey

There's more to the Game of Spoons, but I think I want to wait for a week with fewer disasters.  In the meantime...

You want to see the sky.  Not just the thin blue ribbon between the walls, but the whole sky, spread out like a blanket above you.  I can respect that.  First you need to get down.

This is harder than it seems.  You know the walls, you know the land you've seen, but human nature is your enemy when it comes to estimating the task.  Down should be easy.  You let go of a thing and it falls.  Getting out of the mountains is much harder than it feels it should be, and yes, I know how hard it seems to you.

When I was small, we were certain there was no world at all down there; no world that wasn't covered in bones and thorns and vicious scavenger-birds.  We assumed the earth was dead and it blinded us to the fact that we were dying.

So if you want out, down, to see the world and the ocean and the sunflowers in the west and the great forest in the east and all those things you've heard are down there, you've got to find your own way.  There aren't any maps, because maps are pointless with the ice.

The ice is going to try to stop you.  It used to be better at it; it used to keep everything out and everything in, but worse doesn't mean it's not good at its job.  You might have heard that there are blank-faced Shokkal elders down in the caves the ice creates, ones that might be able to help you, but it's not worth it to seek them out.  Ice caves are dangerous places just in and of themselves.  Add the nature of our ice and how it behaves.  Then add the evil spirits it keeps within.  I've made it through the caves to other places successfully, but I've also come to realize that if you have no other choice but the ice caves, you have no choice at all.

You can head down below, but the tunnels under the ones we use (and the ones below that, and the ones below that...), their only virtue is being free from the ice.  Eventually, they will lead you to Coletus or the Slough.

Coletus is dead.  Coletus has been dead for a long, long time, and whatever they kept imprisoned or whatever they were feeding down there is dead or gone.  But dead things linger down there, they roam the avenues of the sacrifice city in dark, gleaming armor, grow from the walls, snapping and growling, the float, they skulk and they prowl.  There are also the ones who wear thorns who sometimes come to poke around the corpse.  Those are as bad as the scavengers from the stories of how the world died, and unlike the Ugly Birds, they are real.  Avoid them.

The Slough and Coletus are twins, and the only thing that can make you grateful to find the one is having been in the other.  I prefer Coletus, if I am forced to choose, but only because there is a greater chance of dying with dry feet in Coletus, and because the mist over the Slough looks like sky and that messes with the people I have guided.  The Slough is closest to where the Ghouls and Goblins live, close to other things that live with them, but it has its own denizens, things that come up from the blood and shit and runoff from Coletus and the drippings from the ice.

I don't think I need to tell you to stay away from the towers, or from the old gates where the 407s work.  Some of them are friendly, maybe even most of them, but their homes are sacred to them and they can be hard to predict when you meet them there.

If you make it off the mountain, you know, you will be poor, and you'll be among people who don't know you or trust you and think weird things about you, and down the mountain is just as dangerous as up here, most of the time.  But then there is the sky, and I understand you want to see it, if you still want to see it.  Do you?

Good, then.  Godspeed.  I wish I could offer more help.

You Get it or You Don't

d|p recently watched Supernatural.  The whole series to date.  Twice.  I watched it like once and a quarter.*

There's one thing about that show that I really wish I could take with me into the wider world and it is one of the slightly overused dialogue cues.  I'm not sure if this is intentional (I'm pretty sure), but almost all of the characters, usually one per episode will say "I get it" when the really don't get it.  Or they sort of maybe a little bit get it but don't understand shit.  This phenomenon is something that, so far as I can tell, is 100% reliable.  Someone says "I get it" and they don't.

So now I have learned to use this phrase, and to listen to it.  And when I use it, I check myself to see if I understand or I just Winchester-Get-It.  It's pretty reliable in the field.

I would really like to have a reliable way of saying that you or I or someone else just Winchester-Gets-It (even if it has to do double duty as "thinks they understand but doesn't" or "understands but at a really shallow-ass level that might as well be not understanding at all" without having to explain all that to Supernatural non-fans.  Because English doesn't have non-binary ways of talking about understanding.


*Destiel, for the record.

Game of Spoons - Seven Points of Flaws

In our first installment, we took a look at the role empowerment fantasies play in gaming.  I don't want to make too much of this, since I think a lot of people use this, intentionally or no, as a cover or excuse for a lot of the things that are wrong with games.  Our second installment looked at how characters that players control (PCs, here on out) don't function like fictional characters so much as player prosthetic, with a long-winded example of how the assumptions and convictions of designers play into that.

Today, we're going to look at the root of ableist framing in, well mostly tabletop games.  I'm picking on tabletop because of two reasons.  First is a simple matter of qualification - I make tabletop games, not video games, so I can speak to them with a lot more knowledge and authority.  Second is that I think tabletop games are pretty bad in this regard, worse than video games by a long shot in many aspects of promoting baked-in ableism*.

I'll start with the two games of the 90s that I have most played, White Wolf's various World of Darkness (WoD) games and AEG's Legend of the Five Rings (L5R).  Both of these games have a character creation economy wherein you get a certain amount of currency with which to buy different character resources, both optional and compulsory.  As part of this economy, you can also accept negative resources in order to gain more currency to buy positive ones.

In theory, you do not have to take any negative resources, but in practice, the savvy (and the less savvy, and the downright lost and foolish) player took 7 points worth of Flaws in WoD and 10 points of Disadvantages in L5R.  It's worth noting that, in WoD, I and my fellow players always aimed for the Flaws that would have the least impact on play and in L5R, we took the ones that led to the coolest terrible situations we could come up with to happen to the characters.

What they had in common, though, was the fact that both contained disabilities, physical and mental, that you could assign to a character and, in doing so, gain a set amount of currency for accepting that disability.  You get 1 point for recurrent, vivid nightmares, 3 for being unable to talk, 6 for being unable to hear, 7 for being unable to see, 2 for a mental illness which may or may not match something on the DSM, sort of...

There are two things that jump out here, first that a disability is a thing for which you are somehow compensated in potentially unrelated areas - like saying I can drive stick or write stories because I have anxiety disorder.  Every PC in almost every game begins with equal resources, equal access to advantages and disadvantages, equal privilege, at least on paper.  Whatever disability you have to face in the game, you get a commensurate reimbursement, which pretty much negates the struggle.  It erases disability and disabled people.

The second is that, in this economy, all deaf people are equally deaf, all people with schizophrenia are equally functioning, and all of them get the same currency in compensation.  My great aunt is legally blind, but not totally sightless, her eyesight is very poor and has an effective range of about as far as she can reach.  Does she get the full 7 points that a totally sightless person gets or does she just get the 1 point "Bad Sight?"

I'm going to pick on WoD for another minute for calling the broader category of negative character resources "Flaws," because it's the middle finger thrown on top of the whole thing to use a word that carries with it a value judgment.  Here, though, L5R and other games with similar economy don't get off, since most of them group physical and mental disabilities, social marginalization, and external disadvantages with cultural or character failings and moral deficiencies.  The points I get for being mentally ill are the same points I could get for being a hardened and affirmed bigot.

This is the point where we get to the refrain: Why does this happen? Privilege.  But let's be a little more thorough.

I don't think that the people who come up with these systems are hardened and affirmed bigots.  And to a certain extent, I understand the reasoning.  I'll try to portray what I understand of it, but I want to make it clear that my comprehension of it does not mean I agree, and my portrayal of it here is not meant to be an endorsement or defense.  Shit is fucked up and should not be done.

In this case, it comes back to the notion that PCs are not characters in the sense that they are fictional people, but that they are player-prosthetics, player vehicles.  It seems only logical and reasonable to rate a vehicle against other vehicles.  This one is very fast, that one is a gas guzzler, this one has a poor turning radius, that one is really small which is good in some situations and bad in others.  This character can work magic but cannot be hit in combat to often before it breaks, that character suffers a penalty for dice rolls dealing with rats and enclosed spaces, the other one automatically fails rolls that involve auditory cues and has to be within line of sight of someone to communicate with them...

Except that, for the most part, these characters resemble people, and the way the vast majority of human minds work is on the basis of patterns, symbols and metaphors.  To not see how a player-vehicle getting currency for a flaw or defect in that player-vehicle's capabilities transfers over to a value judgment of a person with a disability that has the same name and cultural resonance of that flaw, you need to either train your mind to work in a manner that is anomalous to human experience or be insulated from the implications by privilege.  And those who are insulated by privilege calling for those who are not to give their character economy a pass, not to be so sensitive, not to let it hurt them, they are asking people to train their minds to work in a way that runs counter to usual human experience.  That is not a reasonable expectation.

I've been picking on a certain economic setup in a certain set of games, but there are deeper layers than that, which we will visit next time.

*One place in which video games are notably worse than tabletop is in representation and visibility. There are a lot of problems with how people with disabilities are portrayed in tabletop games.  The only video game I can think of in which you control someone with a disability is a very brief section of Mass Effect 2, in which you get to portray a support character with brittle bone syndrome.