Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 39

Something Must Be Wrong

Last week or so, I have felt a greater need to censor myself than normal.

Found out about the UK's new must-be-fucking-kidding-me immigration policy, and tried to say something, but could not.  Even had the words.  They were not nice words, but the only response to shit like that is cursing and fire.  What do I expect from a nation that effectively outlaws photography?  Not this.  Then I remember the rest of their history vis-a-vis the rest of the world and, oh, there it is!

Last night I had anxiety dreams where I kept saying wildly inappropriate things to my friends.  I don't remember what they were.  Knowing the dream, it was something innocuous, like about arugula or something, and then realizing I just crossed some horrible boundary.  The people in my dream were very gracious about it, which made it all the more horrible, and any time I tried to talk about my mistake, I'd end up dreamwise with someone else.

It goes almost without saying that every time I look at something I've written, my eyes cross.  Hell, this is the most verbiage I've managed to wring out of myself since I finished the story with Buer and Ayn Rand Hell.

Which is probably where I am bound, if not the outer darkness.  Oh.  Wait, not mutually exclusive.

Today is a Good Day for Lowered Expectations

At least I paid all my bills.  I am ahead on my car insurance, apparently, too.  Declaring victory early.  

cucumberseed @ 2012-06-06T15:47:00

No, you know, fuck that last entry.  It's deleted.  I don't stand behind any of that and I won't repeat it.

(It was about politics, in case you missed it.  I hope you did.  There was at least one really unexamined paragraph in there that was 100% shit.) 

cucumberseed @ 2012-06-06T10:54:00

Everything is very quiet this morning.

(Immediately after posting this, I learned Ray Bradbury has died.  Make of that what you will.  I am going back to bed.)

Testing...

dulcinbradbury gave me seven words, I asked to make a story.

Sprout, sing, ukelele, worm, maple, gossamer, yellow

Sprout-Sing, Sprout-Ukelele, Sprout-Worm, Sprout-maple, Sprout-Gossamer, Sprout-Yellow
Sing-Ukelele, Sing-Worm, Sing-Maple, Sing-Gossamer, Sing-Yellow
Ukelele-Worm, Ukelele-Maple, Ukelele-Gossamer, Ukelele-Yellow
Worm-Maple, Worm-Gossamer, Worm-Yellow
Maple-Gossamer, Maple-Yellow


If you want, ask me for seven words in comments, and I will give them to you.  Do with them what you will.

Did not Do the Research

I have just invented salt-water dwelling relatives of hippopotami (to the real world version what salt water crocodiles are to their freshwater cousins).  What would be the best way to name them? They live in a Sargasso like area.  Actually, is there a general term for that kind of oceanic area?  I should find that out.

THALASSOPOTAMUS.  (GRAAH!) 
Awesome.

The Sargasso Sea is not as advertised.  That's okay, in fact, I can come up with something analogous.  Like a giant weed-choked cape.

Also, these were not invented for MFP, but they are totally going in.  Motherfucking Thalassopotomi.  

Submissions Don't Matter

And "Courage" came back, too. 

Dork Stuff

Of interest to probably only me, but let us run with it.  This is stuff I figured out with Justin and Joe last night, and I don't want to forget.

This is notes for me, mostly.  So I am not explaining, I just want this in a place easy to find later.


Bouts by Time
The number of Bouts in a Fight is going to be determined by the amount of fictional time I think the Fight needs to cover.
1 Bout - near instantaneous (stop the bad guy from dropping the baby out the window).
2 Bouts - An old school "combat round"  that is to say, about a minute (slip out the window before your lover's guardian gets to the top of the stairs).  Note this is old school.  A new-school "combat round" would be a 1 Bout thing.
3 Bouts - The average confrontation (argument, altercation) scene.  It's enough bouts for a reversal or maybe two (send the person who just dropped the baby out the window after the baby, violently).  I expect this to be the default for most Fights.
4 Bouts - The average chase scene, also probably the average fight-involving-many-mooks scene.  
5 or more Bouts - An extended investigation, search or procedural scene.  A battle, something grueling, but also something where it is interesting to see how it goes beat by beat.  I'll leave 5+ available for myself and other GMs to use if they need to, but I know I am unlikely to use it very often.  Here's why:

The See-How-You-Go Roll is still in effect.  You will succeed at your stated goal, that's not in question, because failure just isn't interesting, but I want to know what state you're in when you succeed - that is interesting to me.  That's a single bout where the 3-Die Penalty does not exist and 3 hits is the threshold for making it through with no complications (I explained this more fully last time I did something like this).

Bringing the Pain: If a Fight is climactic and interesting enough, you or I can ask to do it D&D style, as a series of 1-Bout Fights.

Peril by Failure by Bout
To date, I have been figuring that the conditions and severity of those conditions you get from losing a Fight is dependent on my mercy alone, but let's put some rails on that.  
When you lose a Fight, I can step your peril die up 1 for losing the Fight, 1 as a 3-Die Penalty, and 1 for each Bout in which you whiffed.  I don't have to give you all of that.  Angel stipulations on failure cannot get you out of Peril, but they can get you out of a kind of Peril (e.g. I don't want to get hurt, so instead I end up frightened to the same amount - mechanically it's exactly the same, but if a certain peril makes a player feel deprotagonized, I have no problem with them using their Angel-ness to get out of it).

1-Die-Bonus, 3-Die-Penalty
You only get either once for a fight, so even on a 5-Bout Fight, if I roll 1 die five times or 3+ dice five times, I only get the bonus or the penalty once.  Likewise, it is possible to get both a bonus and a penalty.  They don't necessarily cancel, they can, if I do not feel like dealing, but don't count on or expect it every or even most times.

[Signal Boost] Tithenai: Linkspam: Scalzi, SWM, and the Necessity of Metaphor

Originally posted by tithenai at Linkspam: Scalzi, SWM, and the Necessity of MetaphorA few days weeks ago, John Scalzi wrote a post called Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is. In it, he sought to explain the concept of privilege to men "without invoking the dreaded word 'privilege,' to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon." He did this by likening life to a video game, with Straight White Male as the easiest setting. He later wrote a follow-up to it and later some final notes.

Megan McCarron responded to the initial essay with a thoughtful, nuanced exploration of the metaphor's virtues and limitations; Chris Barzak took in both the original post and Megan's reply in order to critique Scalzi's positioning of class with reflections on his own experience; Erin Hoffman critiqued the gaming metaphor from a game designer's perspective; and Jim C. Hines, responding to commenters on Scalzi's article (which garnered 800 replies) who seemed to find multiple ways of missing its point, has a comprehensive round-up of statistics which support Scalzi's main thesis.

What I want to talk about is metaphor, and why metaphor is crucial to social justice.

Scalzi posted his essay a couple of days after I spent the better part of an early morning attempting to do some Racism 101 work with a straight white dude on Facebook. While so doing, I kept thinking that it was really, really important to me to find The Best Metaphor, because simple logic just wasn't having an effect. If I could just find The Best Metaphor, surely a world of understanding would open up for this dude, and he would Get It. I wanted One Metaphor to Rule Them All, One Metaphor to Find Them and Bring Them All and in the Searing Light of Privileged Insouciance Bind Them.

What I came up with is none of those things, but I'll share it further down anyway. It's the need that I'm thinking of right now.

Because privilege is, by its nature, invisible, and because we are resistant to being made aware of it, metaphor allows us to perceive its operations outside of ourselves while simultaneously encouraging us to understand how those operations relate to us. To get all, er, meta, metaphor is a mirror in which we can see the invisible knapsack before we begin to unpack it. Or it's a two-way street built between us and a new concept, allowing us to reach it and then return to our initial position enriched. It's in the etymology, this notion of carrying something in between.

But the strength of metaphor is also what makes it vulnerable: that removal from immediate reality in order to explain to someone benefiting from reality that they are so doing is often used as grounds for dismissal. Dozens of comments on Scalzi's blog say things like "this is a complex issue and you're making it too simple with your gaming metaphor, ergo you're wrong," when really the whole point is to attempt to lay the foundations for an understanding of the complexity.

And of course Scalzi's metaphor has limitations, and people like Meghan and Chris and Erin are right to point them out -- but the limitations do not invalidate his main point, nor do they change the fact that Scalzi's post is now a fantastic jumping-off point for these discussions. For instance, the day I started writing this post I saw that ann_leckie had written up a useful metaphor of her own which addresses the idea of privilege with a cafeteria full of bugs. I was especially struck by it because it was very similar to the way I'd tried to explain privilege and the responsibilities attendant on it to the guy on Facebook, locating its problems in environment, systems and food rather than individuals.

So this is what we do: we reach for metaphors. We struggle to make them encompass every possible aspect of our problems. We fail to do so because it is impossible, because the nature of the activity is to find valid similarities, not precise copies. And we swap them, and sometimes in so doing we improve them -- like, I don't know, evolving certain species of Pokémon.

Okay that was a simile.

Anyway, here's what I came up with.


Unfortunately, much of the world's water is poisoned for the vast majority of people, in a vast number of ways. There's a pollutant to which women are vulnerable, and a pollutant to which black people are vulnerable, and a pollutant to which trans* people are vulnerable, and a vast number of others -- almost as many pollutants out there as there are ways to be. Much of the world's water is a swampy soup of pollutants for most of the people. And because each pollutant is unique, many people suffer from multiple pollutants: a disabled woman of colour will suffer from at least three, and likely more, because the pollutants do not function discretely, but combine and mix in a person in order to make her sick in shiny new ways.

But people have to drink water to survive. So for most people, every day, there are choices to be made between whether they will be thirsty or whether they will be ill. Since being thirsty for long enough will make them ill anyway, though, most people end up drinking the polluted water.

Mysteriously, there are a few people who can drink the water without any trouble. Without examining too closely why this is -- where have these pollutants come from, anyway? Who is responsible for them? -- these people who can drink the water without getting sick end up strong, well-hydrated, unlikely to lose time to illness or thirst or the misery attendant on having to choose between illness and thirst. These people, though relatively few in the grand scheme of things, end up dominating the world because they can drink the water -- although you might ask whether they can drink the water because they're the ones dominating the world, certainly.

These people who can drink the water without suffering? They could, by virtue of their strength and their wellness, labour to make the water potable for more people. They could work at figuring out how to get the pollutants out. Some do.

But it takes effort. And there are a lot of people who can drink the water without suffering who might also say, "you know what, I LIKE the way the anti-woman pollutant makes the water taste. It's nice and tart (ahaha). I like the way the anti-class pollutant makes the water taste. Sure it means that some people can't drink the water, but can't they go find some of their own that's not polluted and leave me alone to sip my nice oppression-flavoured water in peace since it does no harm to me whatsoever?"

The trouble is, there is no other water. By virtue of no one being bothered to do anything about it, and the people who can drink the water being so powerful and catering only to themselves, the pollutants fall with the rain and spread and it takes finding underground springs and squeezing water out of plants and WORKING to find clean water. And since the people who need clean water the most are also the ones who are most likely to be already sick and hurting from the shitty readily available water, it's that much harder to get at.

But it's up to them to do the work because no one else can be bothered to.

And what makes that even worse is that sometimes, groups of sick people band together to remove a pollutant. Enough sick women get together and say ENOUGH, WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS POLLUTANT, AND WE ARE GOING TO WORK HARD AND FIGHT TO GET THIS ANTI-WOMAN POLLUTANT REMOVED. And they make such progress! All these suffering women get together and say ENOUGH and while some of the people who can drink the water grumble at how OPPRESSED they are by these sick women's demands, the anti-woman pollutant gets some treatment. And there is rejoicing over a victory, especially from the women who didn't suffer from any other pollutants!

But the women who still do say, "hooray, this is wonderful, one pollutant down! Shall we work on getting rid of the anti-race pollutant now?" And the women who no longer suffer from pollution say "what do you mean? Women don't suffer anymore." And the women who are still sick say "We are women, and we are still suffering."

And the tragedy of it is that so many of the women made strong will shrug and say "we fixed things for women, these other problems you're having aren't women's problems."

And it goes on, and on, and on.
It's a long-winded and overwrought way of saying "my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit," but there it is. It's how I find myself thinking of things lately. And it's another reason metaphor's important -- to help clarify things for ourselves as much as for others.

I welcome your thoughts.

Lamp Cave

Do you think that Gem and Qualm need to meet a Shoggoth before they first set out on their adventure?