Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 44

I Think Lana Del Rey is Pretty Cool

Given the state of the world we live in, it seems weird that my mind wants to grab onto this frivolity this morning, but think of it as my brain's way of putting on the cabaret makeup one more time while burly men in brown shirts are breaking down the doors, and indulge me this frivolity.  It's my last hedge against horror.  

So I think Lana Del Rey is pretty cool.

Wasn't aware of her until after the infamous SNL performance, but I heard the album at a friend's house and was immediately drawn to it, as an artifact, as music, as a performance in and of itself.  Apparently despised because everything about her is, apparently, fake.  This leads me to a certain number of responses, that sort of neatly arrange themselves.

1) Duh.  A certain amount of artifice is pretty much expected in any major label musical release, that's fucking show business.  And the proportion of real to fake in the total product that goes in your earholes, I would guess it at about 80% made-up shit. Apparently the internet has just discovered this and is acting like a bunch of 13 year old boys who just discovered that WWE matches are scripted.  Hello, smart marks, welcome.  Your wisdom astounds.

2) So?  Most of the criticism leveled at the album was based on the live performance (not very good, but not the worst I've seen), and the glaring inconsistencies in her persona.  Also, the antihero will enter the ring around the second pin, and if you don't know if he's helping the face or the heel then you weren't paying attention to the stuff everyone said in the locker room.  

3) I thought that was the point?  No, seriously.  I thought it was the point to be so obviously artificial and co-opt that artifice and make it art.  I thought it was pretty successful, or, at least pretty compelling.  

I mention this because she made spin.com's top 30 most hated bands, which I will link and quote:
(and also, I am only on the schedule for one thing at work today, which is the least work-intensive process in the schedule)

CHARGE AGAINST: Vapid, prefabricated glamourpuss pretends to be indie rock, reimagines Nancy Sinatra as a preening, Lynchian style zombie.

And this is a bad thing?  Again, I thought that was the point.  Also, what's not cool about Nancy Sinatra as a preening, Lynchian zombie.  That's pretty much what I always wanted to imagine her as, and now I DON'T EVEN HAVE TO.

CASE FILES: Despite absorbing indie rock's love of decaying footage and swampy reverb, the former Lizzy Grant (ooh name change - BURNSAUCE) flaunted a pop personality guaranteed to irritate punk purists. The Internet embraced her and then immediately cried that everything was "fake": the name change; the major-label funding; the (allegedly) augmented lips (and yeah... this one has been annoying me recently - the old beauty catch 22 that has some folks poring over pictures of Madonna's hands.  You must live up to X impossible beauty standard.  If you take steps to actually live up to it, you're fake and you lose anyway.  Fuck you patriarchy.  Fuck you with a birch-bark canoe); the fact that her dad, Rob Grant, had scored millions as a domain-name prospector, debunking the singer's claims to simply being the product of a Jersey trailer park. A year of online LDR-bashing climaxed with the most roundly mocked Saturday Night Live musical performance in recent memory (and, no, it wasn't very good); it wasn't clear whether Del Rey was petrified or hypnotized. Twitterers complained that she seemed like a third-tier Kristen Wiig character, and the following week she became one.

THE DEFENSE: Says our own Jessica Hopper: "The issue with Lana Del Rey is not whether she is some corporate test-tubed ingénue, but why we are unwilling to believe that she is animated by her own passion and ambition — and why that makes a hot girl so unattractive (Oh, but does this not sound familiar?  Oh but does this not happen any time a female pop singer gets some measure of success?  Did this not happen to, oh, Lady Gaga [who writes catchy tunes], Katy Perry [who I don't like, but hey], Kei$ha [brilliant parody act... I hope]... one, two, skip a few, 99 Madonna, Grace Jones.)." And the album's not that bad, honestly. KEITH HARRIS

It's Dangerous to Go Alone...

AdversaryArmoredPiercesAdversaryIncorporealTouchesAdversaryInvisibleDetectsAdversaryInvulnerableBaneAdversaryMind BendingReveals/ResistsAdversarySpiritualRepelsAdversaryTeleporterHoldsAdversaryToo FastHomingEnvironmentCold or HotProtectsEnvironmentCursedProtectsEnvironmentFog/Smoke/ParticulateAllows SightEnvironmentLabyrinth/ShiftingFinds Path/LocationEnvironmentPointyBreaks PointsEnvironmentShadowClears (varying levels)EnvironmentUnderwaterBreathingEnvironmentUnderwaterFree MovementObstacleFrozen/Stone/SolidifiedMeltsObstacleGapBridgesObstacleInaccessible AreaFlightObstacleIncorporealSolidifiesObstacleMechanismOperatesObstacleMissing PieceCreates PiecesObstacleMystic SealOpensObstacleWaterFloats

Kingdom Hearts & Dark Souls

Two games into which I have dumped way too much time (of course there is a part of me which takes the hard line - any time not spent earning money, writing or seeing to social and personal needs is wasted - I tell the hardliner that this is research, even the part where I grind so much I am overleveled for the Smaugh and Ornstein fight that I took at a walk [+5 Black Knight Sword FTW].)

Anyway, this is going somewhere.  Out of curiosity, on Monday, I found the youtube channel of one young person, Quelaag, name taken from a mid-game boss of the spider/fire/fanservice hybrid who took it upon herself to research and try to piece together the whole story of Dark Souls, which, I assure you, is not easy.  If you played the game and/or have any interest in the subject of what narrative the game designers were putting together (and you can get passed the unedited and amateurish quality of the videos and the somewhat beginner's understanding of Norse mythology)... Wow, that's a very qualified recommendation.  I found it interesting and useful.  The narrative and the story behind Dark Souls comes up through three vectors, the first being the cut scene/dialogue, which, thankfully is the least of it (game designers overuse the HELL out of cutscenes... Actually, a lot of GMs in tabletop games do as well).  The other two vectors are in the level design and what you see where, and the descriptions for the items, the latter of which is kind of sneaky.  In fact, I am not entirely certain how I feel about that last vector for story.  It seems both intriguingly Easter-eggy, but also slightly rankles my own desire to be a little more transparent.  

The short, short answer is that the salvation you seek as the protagonist for that game is NOT AS ADVERTISED.  There is a choice of two NOT AS ADVERTISED salvations, and when the designers decided to make the story for the game they went to the world buffet of mythology, and walked away with a plate that had a little moussaka and a lot of gravlox.  And that's not a bad thing.

It made me think, for a moment, what a culture would be like if the old Norse beliefs and Christianity had a relationship more similar to Shinto and Buddhism seem to do in Japan, but then I realized that that was VERY DANGEROUSLY CLOSE to dressing up like Hitler at school (still not cool) and dropped that line.

But that's not the game I am thinking about right now.  I am thinking more about Kingdom Hearts, and what you can kind of draw for a world out of that series (excluding the handhelds, which darkpaisley  has played but I have not because fuck the handhelds).


So you have the backdrop of a struggle between darkness and light, which comes to a head when the darkness of the human (and other sentient anthropomorphic critter) heart aggregates and starts making sort of autonomous evil critters who go and steal hearts to sort of feed the dark, and plunge the multiple worlds they encounter into darkness.  There are a couple of things we know about the Heartless - 
1) Pretty novel phenomenon, contemporary to the action of the games.
2) They tend to follow the lead, if not always the commands of any evil being of sufficient personal badness and willpower they run into (I guess including Captain Pete, who doesn't strike me as a very high bar to set for power or evil... Under those circumstance, I think I might be able to swing a handful of the things.)
3) Their makeup and the method of harming them seems to vary - they range from being very individually weak to individually powerful, they can be harmed/destroyed by various people with different powers and weapons, but it's the protagonist's weapon which seems to be special in and of that it can release/reform/redeem the hearts that got tainted to make the creatures.
3a) This becomes a very important plot point later, as the released hearts aggregate as well into a huge power source of unexplained phlebotinum.  
3b) Important people who get turned into heartless also spawn an entirely different class of bad guy, which we will not be addressing, but they really like badass longcoats.
4) Timey-wimey ball shit happens.  Xehanort is a douche and he has a stupid name.

There are a couple of things we know about the conterbalancing force of light.
1) It's pretty passive.
2) It's embodied by/tied to the Disney Princesses (some of their lineup) + the protagonist's love interest.  I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP.
3) As always, Mickey Mouse is the least interestingand compelling character in popular culture, even if I did not hate him for standing athwart the public domain and yelling STOP!

So here's the part I find interesting - in the "light" side of the universe, there are a multiplicity of worlds, divided up into two loose categories:
1) One for each continuity of a featured Disney product.  Fairly diverse, if narrowly constrained.  Some (Atlantica [The Little Mermaid], the Pride Lands [The Lion King], Halloween Town [The Nightmare Before Christmas]), actually change the form that the protagonist appears in.  In KH2, there was even a Pirates of the Caribbean-based world with more... erm... "realistic" depictions of the principles of the movies in relation to the protagonist (whom, by controlling, we also inhabit, which makes that section [with its characters less cartoony than our own avatar] surreal enough that Goofy hangs a lampshade on it).  Most of the action takes place in these worlds.
2) A handful containing Square-Enix characters - these are more contemporary FF fare, with Square-Enix and Disney characters interacting (some of the S-E characters do appear, occasionally, in the Disney worlds, but briefly, and AFAIR, only in the Hercules-based one [Cloud and Sephiroth in KH1 and Auron in KH2].
3) The protagonist's own world, which is based on a Studio Ghibli treatment of modern Japan.  Sort of.

There are methods of travel between these worlds - the first being the interstitial space the protagonist can open with his weapon but must traverse with a suspiciously confectionery-themed space ship, with Chip and Dale as crew (inspiring crew they are not... And not even that mechanically minded mouse from Rescue Rangers for an engineer.  I suppose we could have done worse and gotten Evenrude...).  These interstices appear to also have been mined or taken over by Heartless which you must then shoot (one of the few examples of a minigame that did not make me break out in a rash, but YMMV, and the bar for Square-Enix minigames was set by FF8 - on the floor of Satan's wine cellar).

Then there are the dark roads which are black-door teleporting that the bad guys, the foil and Pluto the dog (in a sort of surprisingly cunning mythological nod - hey, they bring up the fecking Hercules movie in both the console games - I take my mythology where I can) traverse.

In each world, you are tasked with protecting one of the Princesses (for varying values of "Princess" in KH1, I believe that Wendy and Alice qualify, and several of Disney's permanent roster were nowhere to be found, and I am not talking Pocahontas or Elonwy, either... Like SNOW WHITE AND CINDERELLA [I know they show up in the handhelds, but fuck the handhelds], oh, and Kairi.  Let's not forget her...) and/or destroying a particularly annoying and powerful heartless.  Or pissing in Maleficent's corn flakes.  She does it often enough to you, that not a breakfast cereal piece in Kingdom Hearts is untouched by pee by the end.

There's not a lot of point to this - I have a disorganized mind, so I need to write things down, and I like to entertain anyone who stuck around to read this.  And it lead me to an interesting point.  Having gone through Quelaag's analysis of Dark Souls inspired me to look at Kingdom Hearts and strip out both the Disney and the Square-Enix from it, and you get an interesting cosmology.

- Darkness that embodies itself, traverses the universe on secret pathways, and obeys the wills of sufficiently villainous locals in any world it encounters, with the goal of consuming all the "hearts" in that world.

- Light represented by a small group of generally passive or at least highly vulnerable in context people scattered throughout the various worlds.

- Worlds divided up into two rough categories, one being very Fairy-Tale oriented and generally unaware of other worlds or the larger threat posed by the darkness; the other being kind of magitek-contemporary and of varying levels of awareness of the larger world and the threat posed by the darkness.  

That seems kind of interesting and gamable - this last bit interests me, because in the wake of the demise or divorce of Autumn War, I am left with a setting on one side, which I want to use, but only in pieces as they apply to stories, and a system that I like but is, currently, generic, and therefore kind of pointless.  I don't think I would use the de-Disneyed, de-Squared Kingdom Hearts as a setting for the system (I think others would model the game experience better), but this was a fun thought experiment.

But you treat me like a stranger and that feels so rough.

Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes are here!

Originally posted by asakiyume at Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes are here!When I was in middle school, at recess girls still played jump rope games, and these involved rhymes like this one:



Cinderella, dressed in yella
Went downstairs to kiss her fella
By mistake she kissed a snake
How many doctors did it take?
One, Two, Three, Four...

Some time ago, cucumberseed started riffing on this rhyme on his LJ. Lots of other people joined in. Soon we had a collection of bizarre, macabre rhymes for Cinderella. They seemed too good not to share with a wider audience. .... Enter publisher extraordinaire Erzebet Yellowboy of Papaveria Press and the magnificent artist Adam Oelhers, and the result is

Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes



The booklet is being offered for sale through Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and The Book Depository. Proceeds will be used to support Cabinet des Fées and charities of its choice (the link on the booklet's title lists the charities).

If you like the artwork, check out my interview with Adam, here. He is an amazing artist: Here, for instance, is Cinderella fighting off robots with her blast attack:



Come one, come all! Enjoy the creepy fun!

This is about the best thing ever.

I WROTE THROUGH!

I got through the block on Motherfucking Pirates.  I get to keep everything.  Which is good, because the whaling station to hell is 21K of 50K, and while almost all of it is getting cut in second drafts, if I had to redo the first from 29K, I would have walked from it before I got a week's work in.  It's bad, but it's moving forward again.

[Dork] A Little More Information

This is still pretty hard-dork.  Under the cut.

Facts about the Fight – This is our Job Together.

During the Fight, depending on the number of dice you roll and whether or not you get any successes, you or I can say things about what is going on in the Fight that do not relate to the confirm or contradict the stakes we agreed upon.

If our stakes are “Getting the girl away from the goon without her getting hurt.” Then you cannot get the girl away from the goon before and unless the Fight is won, and I cannot hurt her before and unless the Fight is lost.  That said, if you get to state a fact about the Fight, you can hurt the Goon, and if I get to state a fact about the Fight, I can hurt you.

The facts you and I get to establish don’t have to be anything to do with the actions of you or your opposition.  You and I can add or subtract or change things about the scene and the Fight as long as they do not confirm or contradict the stakes.

You can say that the goon’s hands are tangled in the girl’s bindings and he can’t attack you freely.  Or that there is an innocent boarder who has been drawn to this commotion and is ready to help the girl.  Or that there is a portion of the railing you can pull off and use to beat down the goon.

I can say that there is another goon at the top of the stairs waiting for his colleague and the hostage.  Or that your foot goes through the stair, tripping you up.  Or that there is a bubble in the gas system that lights the old house and –oh crap- there’s a fire starting.

Between bouts, it’s possible for you to change your action, your goal, even restate the stakes of the Fight, depending on how things go.

Once the allied boarder is in play, you can ask her to help and focus on taking out the goon.

If the place is in danger of starting on fire, you can lunge for the gas valve to shut it off or, better yet, use the situation to help you convince the goon to do it.

If you fail the bout, I can establish something against your stakes as a result of the failure.

You try to get to the girl, but the goon sees you coming and shoves her against the stairs before he turns to face you.  She cracks her head pretty hard against the step and looks a little dazed.

You try to get to the girl, but the goon sees you coming and runs her up the stairs, shoving her into an upstairs room before turning to confront you.

You try to get to the girl, but the goon sees you coming and runs her up the stairs, dragging her into an upstairs room and slamming to door.

If I do something like this, I can’t make out as if the Fight is lost (you still have a chance to get the girl away from the goon, in the first case, before he does real damage and in the second two cases, before he hurts her at all).

Examples

Hard Violence vs. Ma Fratelli – 6 successes in 1 bout is almost impossible unless someone is very skilled and lucky.  Alice guesses that she’s only got 1 bout for this so asks for the Landlady’s Target.  Watching all the color drain from her face when she hears it makes me happy, because I am a douche.  Alice decides since she’s not winning this on even her usually formidable martial capabilities, and since she’s an Angel, she rolls just her Nature, coming up with a 6.  A success, but she lost.  Fortunately, she gets to stipulate something about the Fight. First, she asks if she can make it so that the landlady is so mad at her, she decides to put off calling for help and attack directly.  I shoot that down – the stakes say “take her out before she calls for backup,” so she’s calling for backup.  That said, backup can be kind of far away, so that gives everyone a little extra time before more goons join the fray.  Alice then states that the resounding clang to the old lady’s head does little more than piss her off, and her eyes fill with rage directed at Alice and Alice alone (she thinks she can take the old lady in an extended Fight).

Hot Disaster to Save the Girl – 5 successes in 3 bouts.  Ballast isn’t sure how much time he has on this, so he asks for Target.  Learning he has a 5 Target, he suspects that this operation is going to be trickier than he thought, so throws his Strength and a Trait “Agile” into the Fight, willing to risk a worse outcome to knock this off quickly (especially in light of Alice’s Fight).  He manages 2 successes on the first roll, and with 3 dice rolled, I get to tell him that the stairs are really narrow, single-file, and that the goon’s body is totally blocking him from the girl.  Ballast is not dissuaded; he spends a strength and cries “There are no limits! I parkour up the railings, off his back, and over his head, landing in front of the girl!”  I think this is awesome – so we go Hot Against Disaster again.  This time he gets 3 successes on 3 dice and wins.  Ballast is also an Angel, so I narrate his victory, telling him it works like a charm, but, because he rolled 3 dice, as he gets to the girl and pulls her away, he notices that she has a bag over her head, can’t see him and starts struggling against his attempts to save her.

Soft Violence vs. Stairway Goon – 4 successes in 2 bouts.  Cilice is not confident in her martial abilities at the best of times, and decides that in order to accomplish this, she’s going to reach under Ballast as he’s going up and over and grab the goon’s shoe, tripping him.  She spends Strength on this, but lacking anything that might help her with this, that’s all she’s got.  She’s also got no successes on the first roll of 2 dice.  The goon stomps on her hand as she grabs for him.  Something might be broken.  Okay, no more Ms. Nice Cilice.  For her next bout, she decides to throw the whammy on him with magic, slides the talisman into her uninjured hand and says she’s going to make him dizzy and frightened on these narrow, steep stairs, which she convinces me is Dark against Will.  This time, she has an Instinct and a Trait to add, so she does, managing 5 successes on 3 dice.  A winner is Cilice, and as a Devil, she tells me that the massive fear and vertigo she induces in him knocks him the hell out, but I get to say something now.  It occurs that when the goon gets dizzy and falls down, he’s got nowhere to go but onto Cilice.  He’s down for the count, but she’s down at the bottom of the stairs underneath him, with a broken hand.

Bright Will vs. Door – 2 successes in 1 bout.  Dallas has a gonzo ability that lets him pull this off.  He knows it can’t be that tricky, but he fears he has little time.  Also, his friends have not been rolling so well, and he’s about to be in the middle of a Alice vs. Ma Fratelli No-Holds-Barred.  So he asks about Timing and is sad to hear he has only one shot at this.  Still, he’s just as scared of compromise as he is of failure, so he takes his favorite 2 dice and goes for it, getting 3 successes.  Dallas is also a devil and says that door is going to stay stuck unless they break it down, break his spell or he decides to let it go.  I am good with that.  It might not be as strong a door as he’s hoping, depending upon how subsequent Fights go.  Also, he said “stuck” which means they are stuck in as much as the goons are stuck out.

Submissions Don't Matter

Two poems bounced, which does not surprise me.  One was sort of tangential, at best, to the theme of the market and the other was made raw and sent out fast in response to a call for subs - not the best circumstances for either, really, but I got good words on the latter poem, so that's nice.  I think it could use a little more time marinating and another draft, but then it's got a future.  

Sometimes I Hate it when She's Right.

Especially when she tells me I never should have gone to hell, or the whaling station for that matter, if I didn't know where to take it from there or what the point was in going there.  But she's right, and I know the truth when I hear it, and the fact is, a deep and lasting paralysis set in on Motherfucking Pirates, and I think the only way out is back to where I lost the thread.

So.  

Sometimes it helps to step back and look at the things we have come to take for granted and restate them.  So let's look at the Pirates and see what we have.

The Big Conflict:
Red Hull, Queen of the Motherfucking Pirates stole Gem's boyfriend (well, he didn't know it at the time), Qualm's brother, (coincidentally to give to her daughter, Swift) and Gem wants to get him back.  There are some things standing in the way of this.
1) Catching the Strigiform or finding the Floating Island is something that several governments' navies are failing their damnedest to do.
2) Red Hull is WAY out of Gem and Qualm's weight class.  I mean the devil is afraid of her, and he fucking sired her.

The Little Conflicts:
Gem has been born with a gift for and inclination towards violence.  She wants to use this for good and not evil, but isn't sure it's even possible to do, or how it would be done.
Qualm has the hobbit's dilemma.  He will not be going back to the Shire when this shit is all over, and he needs to grow into not being the simple fisher boy that he thought he was and really just wanted to be.
Swift needs to get out from under her mother's shadow, mostly, and figure out what her place in the world is.  She also might like girls more than she likes boys.
Bacon wants to be fully human, at least she thinks she does, but she hasn't considered all the ramifications of humanity and still, I think, thinks she can have it both ways in regards to being human and being a super-science squid.
Ilex hates the whole idea of adventure and has run from it right up until the point where it finally caught her.  Like Qualm, she wants to but cannot live in the Shire, but unlike Qualm, she never was a hobbit.

I wonder if it makes more sense for me to write first drafts in novella form, really condensed, so I get the story out, and then expand it in the subsequent drafts.  I hear that some people do this, and I know my first drafts will never be right the first time.  I know, also, that outlines don't do shit for me but give me a false and poisonous sense of accomplishment when I make them and then give me a sense at between the 50 and 60K mark of how far wrong I've gone.

Does anyone else do this?  Has anyone else done this?  Written a condensed first draft to expand?  How did it work?