Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 37

Testing...

I like that Suaron's biggest threat was internal.  His forces were powerful and scary, sure, but his two major foreign campaigns were unmitigated disasters.  His power was always strongest in the heart.  The rest of the things that differentiate Tolkien from his imitators doesn't particularly interest me.

I like it when Silent Hill gives manifests horrors tailored to the subconscious of the observer, but I don't like it when they are overly simplistic or allegorical with it.  

I like the black goo as a magic tool of creation and destruction that did not seem to be under the control of even those giant white guys in Prometheus.  I really like the idea of someone getting hold of something they don't understand and having it defy their expectations in horrible ways while trying to conform to their horrible expectations.

I like that Amon and Tarlock were not the same guy, In fact, I liked Amon right up until the last episode and then I hated him.  I don't like that Amon was a huckster and a blood bender.  I wanted to see more of the things that justified the Equalists' popularity and support.  

I like that the Ash Lake in Dark Souls implied that there were other worlds than the one you moved about in, and that Ash Lake itself was something of a backstage area.

I like the difference between what Dragon's Dogma showed you and told you - that the Duke's depression had manifested in the crumbling of the duchy and the return of the dragon, that he might have been a pawn (an ageless human simulacrum without [much] will) masquerading as human, or some human/pawn hybrid, and that everything that everyone kept telling me about how he was a hero and a great ruler doing all he could to rebuild and strengthen the land was belied by everything else - the ruins, the monsters, the banditry, the fact that he acts like he's afraid of you, the fact that the young Duchess wants in your hosen the moment she sees you, regardless of your gender or age or anything...

Hm.

[Dork] The Lightning and the Ghost

It occurred to me that when I am picking at my game system, I am designing it to teach me how to design games.  It's interesting, but something I get to circle around every so often when I feel I have done enough real writing.  Today, for instance.  

Two things happened.  I started browsing the archives of Deeper in the Game, and I wrote out the things you can do in my system the way I would have if it were a hack of Apocalypse World.  I may not like the tone or the subject matter of that game (I don't dislike them, either, except that I will never play a Hardholder around anyone whose opinion of me I cherish, because I assumed LARP form* and that was not cool), but holy shit, dissecting it is how I learned anything useful I know about making games.

One thing I realized about the game I made was that I have designed it so that, some meta-stuff aside, there are six different kinds of things players can do: Face Disaster, Face Hardship, Face Ignorance, Face Malevolence, Face Violence and Face Want.  This are the things you do.  That's the world I made, that's the stories you can make.  Conflict is dictated by those choices I made.  Resolution runs along those lines.  

This realization has something whirring in my head.  One of the things that I have sought after in design, in my head, anyway, is the possibility of an adventure game in which combat and violence are not major options, or not really options at all, possibly, and how to design that in such a way that all us gamers, who have been conditioned with combat=adventure.  

I come back to Autumn War all the damned time.  I tried using the system above, but it never quite worked because I didn't know what the hell I was doing with it.  I liked the idea of Facing things instead of being Strong or Smart or Agile, but I was facing things that were very generic, when everything I wanted was a lot more specific.  If I were going to go back to the Provinces (which I won't do until Motherfucking Pirates is finished), this is how I might define the Nature of the characters.
Face Fear - Try to accomplish things that are frightening; rescuing someone from a river, talking to the Oak deserters, going into the dark thicket.Face Grief - Social things and help, make connections with others, bolster those who are despairing, not despair. Help out, in general.  In fact, unlike other versions of this system, you helping another person reach their goals is as much a Fight for you as reaching their goals is for them.Face Darkness - Both in terms of what is hidden and what is supernatural and ooky.  Reach into the dark and feel what reaches back.Face Hardship - Again, pretty standard, do things that demand your stamina and will.Face Wilderness - The forest is your enemy and your friend.  It can hide you, shelter you, give you what you need, or it can freeze you, strand you and feed you to Ugly Birds.Abilities in the basic system give you special things you can do.  Here it would be similar, but I am thinking I would tie them closer to the actual Aspects of Nature - for instance, if you want to be able to initiate violence against someone, that's an Ability that goes along with Facing Fear.  You can buy it, but unless you do, you can't win a violent altercation, or get anything useful out of it, you can only not lose.  That's not to say you're prohibited from saying "I hit that guy," just that it isn't going to get you very far.  You win and the guy is hit, so unless all you wanted was to inflict harm on a guy, then you're not really getting anything out of it. 

Another thing I realized in writing this is that, not only is it important what buckets I choose to put actions in, but also how I divide actions between the buckets.  With what I am working on now, supernatural fuckery and social head-to-head argument and persuasion is grouped up together.  In the thing above, information gathering and supernatural stuff is together.  If I were going to try TLA/LOKverse, then supernatural stuff (bending) would be in with physical violence.  

Even names might be important.  Face Disaster for a Motherfucking Pirates game would probably become Face Danger and Face Action, because there is a setting where action is extremely violent.  Face Ignorance would be Face Mysteries.

It's all coming out of moves.  Moves are powerful.

*LARP form is like getting infected with the rage virus from 28 Days Later, only instead of killing people and vomiting blood, you become a raging douche.

WORMHOLE TECHNOLOGY ACQUIRED

"Dead Air for River Stones" which I wrote for sovay , has been picked up by Not One of Us!

Submissions Don't Matter

"Fear-a-Fight" got trimmed to below 3000 words and sent off.

Likewise, "Malus" is on its way, though not to the place it was originally written to go.

I have five short stories out, only one of them at a place I've cracked.  Also, one poem.  I should send a few more of those out.

post

Originally posted by aliseadae at postVia upstart_crow Originally posted by wordweaverlynn at Fundraiser for Mary Kristene Chapa's Medical Bills

(Please repost if you're so inclined)

Many of you may have heard about the teen lesbian couple shot in Texas. One of them, Mollie Judith Olgin, was killed; the other, Mary Kristene Chapa, survived but has hospital bills.

A family member has erected a fundraising site for Chapa's medical expenses. If you can do so, I'm sure she'd appreciate the help.

This entry was originally posted at http://wordweaverlynn.dreamwidth.org/572412.html. Please comment here if you want, or there using OpenID. Or send em a message via carrier pigeon or fortune cookie. I'm dying to hear from you.

Submissions Don't Matter

"Mars Will Out," the story about Buer, Mars, the Ayn Rand Hell and bakers, is out on its way.

Submissions Don't Matter

Poem bounced.  I think I have an idea of where next to send it.  Still.

See the Egress

Sic Semper Readercon:

If you show up to anything, Saturday, 11 in the morning.  Show up to that.  I will be starting bribery, flattery, begging, and emotional blackmail to get you to my reading, or, you know, if you have a reading that isn't at one of the listed times below, show up to it in kind.


Thursday July 128:00 PM    F    Unfinished Symphonies. Erik Amundsen, C.S.E. Cooney (leader), Maria Dahvana Headley, Natalie Luhrs, Sarah Smith. One of George R. R. Martin's fans threatened to camp out at the author's house with a shotgun and an espresso machine until Martin buckled down and finished the Song of Ice and Fire. Recent years have seen Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time continued by Brandon Sanderson, a fourth book in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast completed (from only a fragment) by Maeve Gilmore, and younger writers completing some of Philip Jose Farmer's works, for only a few examples. Are such projects merely opportunistic attempts by publishers to extend a franchise, an exalted form of fanfic, or legitimate works of creative literary scholarship? Should unfinished series simply be let lie, or should the reader's (and bookseller's) desire for more trump notions of literary "purity"? And why do readers care so much about seeing series through to the end?9:00 PM    RI    How Fantastic Is Fantasy?. Erik Amundsen, Ron Drummond, Andy Duncan, Katherine MacLean (leader), Faye Ringel. Audience members discuss events of supernatural import that we ordinarily keep locked in the closet: luck, coincidences, things that go bump in the night, telepathy and precognition, visions and dreams. Many people have had Experiences, but no one wants to look like a nut. In this discussion, we'll let loose and explore our personal experiences of the places where reality gets weird.

Proposed by Katherine MacLean.Friday July 1311:00 AM    NH    Group Reading: Mythic Poetry. Mary Agner, Mike Allen, Erik Amundsen, Leah Bobet, C.S.E. Cooney, Gemma Files, Gwynne Garfinkle, April Grant, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Shira Lipkin, Adrienne J. Odasso, Julia Rios, Darrell Schweitzer, Sonya Taaffe. Over the past decade, speculative poetry has increasingly turned toward the mythic in subject matter, with venues such as Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, Cabinet des Fées, Jabberwocky, and the now-defunct Journal of the Mythic Arts showcasing a new generation of poets who've redefined what this type of writing can do. Come to the reading and hear new and classic works from speculative poetry's trend-setters.5:00 PM    G    Why I Stopped Writing. Erik Amundsen, Nathan Ballingrud, Steve Berman (leader), Geary Gravel, Jennifer Pelland, Luc Reid. We've all seen writers logging their word counts, charting their progress toward the next novel or short story. And we've heard the advice to keep writing and submitting. But is it ever a good idea to just stop? What can we gain from getting off the publishing merry-go-round, at least for a while? Is stopping a sign of failure, or just another stage in a writer's career? The panelists discuss how and why they stopped writing (and maybe started up again).Saturday July 1411:00 AM    VT    Reading. Erik Amundsen. Erik Amundsen reads his short story "Draftyhouse," published in Clarkesworld.Sunday July 1512:00 PM    F    Why Is Ancient Evil Ancient?. Erik Amundsen, Elizabeth Hand (leader), Matthew Kressel, Sarah Langan, Kate Nepveu, Ruth Sternglantz."Ancient evil" tends to be used as a shorthand for all the things we fear in our hindbrains, and everything lurking in the dark that we can't explain. It calls to mind something primordial that we feel we should have evolved past but still fear on some basic level. When we cite ancient evil in fiction, is its ancientness just a way of disclaiming that the evil isn't our fault, and thereby dodging the need to deal with evils that we could have prevented and could still avert? What if the ancient evil isn't entirely evil, just misunderstood? How do fictional treatments of ancient evil differ in cultures that venerate tradition and age versus those that prioritize innovation and youth?

Sea Languages, Cultural Icons

This is asakiyume 's fault:  I hauled out three terms with very vague and general ideas and she told me what she heard, and it was awesome.

There are three languages that the sea speaks that the Seafaring Cultures of MFP also use with some regularity.

Littoral which is a language of change, things half in and half out, half there and not there, ebb and flow.  It's the most commonly used of the languages since it adapts well to human situations and the workings of circumstance.

Pelagic a deeper language, still full of movement, but more apparent purpose, less equivocation.  Seafarers use it to define terms, make plans, swear oaths (though simply swearing is more satisfying in a patois of Littoral and Pelagic).  The law is written in this language.

Sailors make reports in Littoral, officers give orders in Pelagic.  Usually.  Being properly persuasive requires the use of both, to define and to convey meaning.  

Benthic is a deep language.  If you have looked into the sea (and few are those in the world who have not), you understand the words.  Sacred law is written in Benthic, as is, if such a thing exists, the Pirate's Code, for Benthic is the only language dire enough to scare pirates into following something like a code.  Benthic is not used in polite conversation.  It is to an argument what drawing weapons is to a brawl.  The words can leave lasting injuries in the psyches of the listeners.  Captains will occasionally use Benthic to stem a mutiny, but it's considered kinder and more decorous to use a gun.

Yeah, there is probably a deeper language, still, and some languages that slip between; Neritic and Demersal, but those aren't in wide use by human beings.  Neritic sometimes comes into fashion as a sort of cant for certain cabals and groups, and Demersal has amazing powers of secret keeping, but neither has ever been to popular.  Abyssal, as far as I am concerned, is someone's over dramatized (and possibly traumatized) account of someone dropping Benthic truths, but you never know.  The ocean has no bottom.


AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

I saw an "I Love Lucy" novelty license plate and thought about pop-cultural icons and how people tend to latch onto them, wondering if I could come up with some sort of taxonomy for different popular icons and the people drawn to them.  Generally, I find this pretty harmless, and am never too upset to run into someone with a Superman S tattoo who probably wouldn't know what hero starred in Action Comics, for instance.  I had, until recently, a co-worker who was drawn to Mickey Mouse, and thought about the Disney characters that get the most identification (and mused on the fact that Tinkerbell is right up there, or that on the Warner side of things, Tweety Bird is probably the one I see most).  

I think about darkpaisley  talking about an old friend's affinity to Spider-Man (she's for Batman).  I thought about Elvis fans.

I don't think this is really going anywhere.  It's just something that popped up in my head for reasons.  I wondered, also, if I had something like that, and thought for a little while that I didn't.

Then I noticed how many Muppets icons I have on my LJ.  Particularly everyone's favorite nosferatu for numeracy, Count Von Count.

How many of you knew that was his full name?

Yup.  There I go.

Is this a Real Song

Had a dream last night where three people from high school, with whom I was not very close, were actually good friends in some Hogwartsian college, living in a suite made out of giant, ornate bookshelves in some cavernous dorm.  We were trying to kill these rather dangerous cat-monster-vermin things by shooting lightning bolts through cracks in the floor.

The reason I mention this is because there was a song playing in the dream that was unmistakably the Cranberries (or at least, lead singer Dolores O'Roidan) and the bit that I caught was something like this.

*blah blah blah*
We're the lucky ones
We go out and the kids go home (alternately, "we go out with our friends along"  or "we go out with the kids along")

Does this come from a real song?  Is this a mondegreen of a real song?  Or was this some unholy combintation of "Salvation" and that song from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer soundtrack (not by the Cranberries, but someone else "Lucky Ones" or "We are the Lucky Ones").  In either case, it was chipper and it sounded like them.  Unfortunately, that melody is disintegrating in my head, and you tube is not turning up anything easily, and I will be damned if I am going to listen to the whole discography in search of a song that my brain might have meat-glued together.

I have a bit of a vendetta against the Cranberries thanks to an argument with a former lover (my relationships that lasted more than a month, of which there have been six have alternated between Bad Music Relationships and Good Music Relationships - all the odd numbered ones were bad and all the even numbered ones were good) who argued their music circa No Need to Argue (which does have a killer last three songs, admittedly) was more varied and experimental than Siouxsie and the Banshees.  Not "I like them better," (misguided, but acceptable) but "more different and musically interesting sound in two albums" (demonstrably wrong).